New Coronavirus News from 27 Jan 2023

After 3 years of Covid, CNN went into rural China for Lunar New Year. Here's what we found and how officials tried stopping us [CNN, 27 Jan 2023]

By Selina Wang

In China’s southern Guizhou province, there’s a tiny village in the southeast corner, nestled deep within the mountains, called Dali. A wall of lush green trees and bamboo surround this village of about 1,000 people, who’ve lived in wooden homes with gray-tiled roofs for centuries.

It’s the Lunar New Year, and during the daytime, the doors are rarely closed. People here say they’re all relatives, and the village is like one big family. Almost everyone shares the surname Yang, except for a few families with the last name Li or Wang. Most people I met asked me to call them “Xiao Yang” or “Little Yang.”

We walked by a raucous group of young adults, sat shoulder-to-shoulder on tiny stools around a short table packed to the brim with food. The men smoked and ate at the same time, throwing tangerine peel and the hulls of sunflower seeds on the ground. I explained to them I was a foreign journalist, trying to tell the story of how they celebrate the New Year.

“We celebrate by drinking!” one man at the table said, before I could finish my explanation.

They invited me to join in, squeezing one more stool around the table. A man handed me a plastic bowl, and another started filling it with their homemade 60-proof rice liquor, pouring it from a massive clear plastic bottle that looked like a gasoline container.

A woman said they all worked in factories in the cities. This was the only time many of them could see their children.

“We go wherever we can make money,” the man next to me said. He typically returns home only for the Lunar New Year, but for the past three years even that has become hard due to Covid restrictions.

“Before, when we wanted to go home, we couldn’t, he said. “But now the country is open, we can all go home. We’re happy.”

Time capsule
Dali Village is like a time capsule, untarnished by the skyscrapers and pollution of modern China. Its comparative isolation has preserved its people’s way of life for centuries. Cars can’t drive into the village or fit in its narrow, cobblestone streets. The village’s white noise is roosters crowing, pigs squealing, and the occasional boom or pop from children setting off fireworks.

All the inhabitants are Dong people, one of China’s 56 officially recognized ethnic minorities.

They have their own language, tradition and culture. Many of the women, especially the elderly, wear indigo shirts embroidered around the hem, with their shiny hair twisted into a bun around a red-toothed comb. The pace of life is unhurried. Women weave colorful ribbons on the streets. Villagers wash vegetables in a stream that cuts through the village. Children run around the wooden drum tower without their parents in sight. Elderly men amble into the rice paddy fields carrying their pet birds in cages.

The bases of the mountains are chiseled with stepped rice paddies. Vegetables blanket the land nearby. Chicken and ducks roam on nearly every street. Pigs lay inside wooden pens.

Dali is surrounded by mountainous terrain, full of craggy, steep, and winding roads. The only way to get there is to walk or drive up a big mountain, then down into the valley. Dali’s remoteness means people here, over the centuries, have learned to be self-sufficient. They grow or raise most of their own food. Some families have vegetable patches next to their homes or plots of land closer to the mountains.

It’s pastoral and idyllic in many ways, but Dali Village can’t escape the economic realities of modernity.

A young woman, Xiao Qing, invited us into her home. Her parents and grandfather were wearing winter jackets, sitting around a small coal fire on the ground to stay warm. The concrete room was decorated sparsely, with a bunch of sweet potatoes hanging from the ceiling.

Xiao Qing’s father is only in his mid-40s, but his face is tan and weathered with wrinkles from years of hard labor. Her dad worked in factories while she was growing up. After Xiao Qing graduated from high school, she took the baton, went to the factories, and became the family breadwinner.

“I’ve been very homesick working away from home,” Xiao Qing said. “Staying at home means farming. Young people like us don’t get much income from farming.”

Only once a year, during the Lunar New Year, does she return from work in a cosmetics factory, 500 miles away in Guangdong province. Her story is echoed across all the families in Dali Village, and across rural China. Large swaths of China’s countryside are full of the elderly and young kids, with most of the working-age adults gone. They’re working in far-away factories as low-cost labor powering China’s status as the world’s largest manufacturer, while sending their earnings back home.

One villager puts it this way: leaving home to go far away is just a fact of life, there’s no other choice for survival.

We visited a young couple on the other side of the village, who live in a wooden home on the side of the mountain. They both work in factories in Guangdong province, making circuit boards.

His two young children, a boy and girl, were jumping on the couch behind us during the interview. His daughter, wearing a red Hello Kitty sweater, kept swinging her arms around her dad’s shoulders to give him a warm embrace.

He said his son could barely walk when he last saw him, but now, he’s running around. He didn’t return for the holidays until a few days ago, after midnight. “But my daughter, she insisted on waiting for me out here. When I walked through the door, I hugged her, but she had already fallen asleep.”

Traces of Covid
I didn’t see anyone wearing a mask in Dali Village, except for the few tourists coming through, nor did I see any Covid antigen tests, or much medicine lying around people’s homes. The sense of normalcy was surprising.

In Beijing, where I had just flown in from, many people were still wearing masks outside. When I visited hospitals in the city weeks before, they were overflowing with elderly patients. Common cold and fever medicine had sold out. Crematoriums were swamped. Families told me they had to wait days to cremate their loved ones.

When we first arrived in Guizhou, we landed in Tongren, a city about a four-hour drive from Dali. Our taxi driver said his family in the countryside had all been infected with Covid. He said many people he knew died at home, because they couldn’t afford to go to the hospital.

I tried to find out if Dali Village’s remoteness has shielded it in any way from China’s wave of Covid cases and deaths.

There was one funeral ceremony during our stay in Dali, but all the villagers said the deceased was a man in his 90s who died of old age.

Everyone I interviewed on camera said no one around them had been infected. A few elderly villagers I spoke to said they were fully vaccinated and hadn’t gotten sick. But I ran into a group of young people, eating hot pot outside, who said otherwise. I squatted next to them around the table, since there were no stools left. One of them, it turned out, is a doctor at a hospital in a nearby city.

“Almost all villagers have been infected. They had symptoms,” he told me, as he picked a piece of meat out of the boiling pot of soup with his chopsticks.

I asked him if the villagers knew whether it was Covid, or if they just thought it was a cold.

“It’s like a cold anyway,” another man interjected.

The doctor replied, with his back turned to the camera the whole time, “They just haven’t been diagnosed, but the symptoms match Covid. They just never tested.”

Close watch
A group of six government officials greeted us the moment we arrived in Dali Village. It’s common for local officials to keep a close eye on foreign journalists in their jurisdiction, but they were especially persistent in this village, following our every move.

At least four of them booked rooms in our same hotel, or nearby. No matter how early we woke they would be waiting in the lobby, see us walking down the stairs and follow us.

We could often see them whispering to villagers soon before or after we interviewed them. They brought in another local official who spoke the Dong language, preventing any of us from understanding her conversations with villagers. All of the officials refused to clearly answer what their objective was, or what they were telling the villagers.

It quickly became apparent I would be unable to further investigate the Covid situation in the area, with the officials hovering over us. Hence, we drove out of the village to a public hospital in the neighboring county about two hours away, hoping the minders wouldn’t follow and that people would be more comfortable speaking freely.

The hospital’s fever clinic was almost entirely empty. The main hospital area had more people, but it wasn’t packed. It was a stark contrast to the images of overcrowded hospitals in major cities across China.

I wanted to know: had the peak of Covid infections already passed in this area?

We went to another floor of the hospital and asked a nurse if the place had been packed a few weeks ago. “It’s always packed and busy here,” she replied. She couldn’t say anything more because a doctor came through and interrupted, ending our interview.

One woman, a patient’s family member, told me outside the hospital that everyone around her already had been infected with Covid and then recovered.

Soon after, we realized we were being followed. A man approached us outside the hospital and said he was part of the propaganda department.

We showed him our press cards and told him we were here to report on the Covid situation and Lunar New Year festivities. We got in the car and left.

At a village clinic a 30 minute drive away, the same man and another woman followed us in.

We saw them say something to the staff there, then suddenly no one would speak to us, so I went outside and asked nearby stores if they had seen lines outside the clinic a few weeks ago. Every time, the government minder would interrupt the conversation to speak to the interviewee, clearly telling them not to say anything.

The government officials again appeared at the next hospital we visited. This time, there were more of them. I tried confronting them, asking why they were following us. Anytime I spoke to them, they would immediately walk away and ignore me. Then, the moment I turned away, they would continue tailing us, while obstructing our reporting.

We drove to a nearby marketplace to grab lunch. The roads were lined with tents selling a kaleidoscopic array of Lunar New Year goods. Multiple stores were selling boxes of firecrackers stacked from floor to ceiling, with giant red banners and lanterns for sale hung on the outside of the tents. Live chickens, frogs, and fish were on sale, along with fresh produce. If you purchased a chicken, they would snap its neck on the spot.

At the corner of a street, a group of siblings were waiting in line for skewered, roasted meat and vegetables. We approached them, identified ourselves as journalists working for a foreign media network called CNN, and asked if anyone would speak to us about their Lunar New Year experience.

The young woman agreed. I had only asked her a few questions about how excited she was to be back and if it was hard to book a train ticket home, when a government minder suddenly walked into the middle of the interview, while we were still filming, and grabbed her away, abruptly ending our interview. He pushed her and her family away, then left them alone.

We left and headed to several more hospitals. But with the minders following and interfering, we couldn’t get responses from anyone.

Covid peak
China’s CDC says the Covid peak across the country has passed since the government abandoned its zero-Covid policy.

It says that 80% of the population, or more than 1.1 billion people, have already been infected.

Health authorities claim that visits to clinics for fever and Covid hospitalizations have declined since their peaks in late December and early January.

Experts say China’s population had almost no underlying natural immunity before reopening, while existing Chinese vaccines offer limited protection against infection from Omicron, so one massive wave ended up sweeping over the whole country – hitting rural and urban areas almost simultaneously.

What makes China different is that Covid “can spread like wildfire without any impediment”, said Yanzhong Huang, a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations.

“The speed and scale of the spread challenged conventional wisdom. Almost at the same time Covid was wreaking havoc in urban areas, we saw the rapid increase of infections in many parts of rural China.”

But Huang adds that the government has not released accurate data on the scale and toll of the outbreak. The Chinese government says more than 72,500 people with Covid died in hospitals between December 8 and January 19, but the World Health Organization has suggested these numbers “under-represent the true impact of the disease.”

In rural areas, experts say there’s likely far more silent suffering. More people likely died at home because they couldn’t afford, or were unable, to get to the hospital.

Pig feast
Back in the village, we were greeted by the sounds of squealing pigs, getting ready to be slaughtered. This is an important part of the Lunar New Year tradition in Dali. Decades ago, for most countryside families, this was the only time of the year when they could afford to eat meat.

Now, it’s about bringing the family together to feast. Some of the families raise the pigs themselves, others buy them from sellers. I came across a truck of squealing pigs right at the village entrance. With a string tied around the pig’s hoof, a man tugged the pig out of the truck, using his whole body weight to drag it through the streets. All the while, the pig was screaming and using all of its might to stay put. The man used a stick to hit the pig, coaxing it to move.

A woman next to the truck was watching, unfazed. She told me she was the one who sold him the pig. Now that people are allowed to gather and barbeque together, her business is booming.

Families pick a day shortly before the Lunar New Year holiday to slaughter the pig, either themselves or by hiring a butcher. They immediately smoke part of the meat to make “la rou” or cured pork belly, which can last them all year, but a portion of the meat is for feasting as soon as it’s cooked.

A villager we befriended over several days invited us to her home for their post-slaughtering feast. The extra pig carcass was laying in the middle of her home, divided into numerous giant metal bowls. Her house was packed with relatives, seated around two tables.

San Jie is popular in the village. She’s in her 50s, spunky, extroverted, and always smiling.

Throughout the week, we saw relatives and friends constantly coming in and out of her home, either to borrow her tools and expertise, or simply to say hi. Groups of relatives frequently walk into her home with giant wooden buckets of piping hot sticky rice, harvested from the paddy fields nearby. They’d dump the rice into a machine in her home that turns it into a paste to make ciba, a traditional sticky rice cake. Every time we ran into her, she would insist we come inside to eat and open up her best vats of homemade liquor.

When San Jie was younger, she worked in a factory sewing jeans. Now, she uses her skills to make clothes and fabrics for villagers. She showed me the clothes they wear for different occasions, how they intricately wrap their hair, and how they adorn heavy silver neck pieces and ornaments.

I touched a piece of intricately woven black and white cloth more than a meter long. She said making just a thin, inch-long strip of that cloth takes her more than a day of sewing.

I asked San Jie and the other elderly female family members if their children know how to make these clothes. Laughing, they said their children wouldn’t have the patience, but San Jie said she has taught her younger daughter how.

“I told my daughter it’s too tiring, too exhausting. My back and neck hurt. It’s all for your education,” San Jie said. “My daughter said, ‘Mom, let me help you’, so she learned.”

Her elder daughter works in a factory in Guangdong, leaving her two toddlers in her care. Her younger daughter, who is in high school, stood near the doorway during our whole conversation, engrossed in a mobile phone game. San Jie said she doesn’t need to waste time learning old traditions, but instead should focus on her studies.

We said our goodbyes in the village and got in the car for the long drive to the airport, our tummies full of sticky rice and our heads warm from rice liquor. We noticed the same car from before was following us all the way to the airport, and wondered how the minders in Dali would write up a report on our trip for their bosses in the propaganda department. They witnessed us befriend and learn from the hardworking Dali villagers, who are willing to do whatever it takes to give their children a better life.

New Coronavirus News from 28 Jan 2023

‘So broken’: virus exposes ‘serious deficiencies’ in Chinese healthcare [South China Morning Post, 28 Jan 2023]

• China spent enormous sums of money on building isolation facilities and makeshift hospitals, as well rolling out mass testing
• But after Beijing abruptly pivoted from zero-Covid, a surge in infections overwhelmed the medical system, highlighting deficiencies

China’s investment to fight the coronavirus, particularly the construction of makeshift hospitals, has exposed “serious infrastructure deficiencies in healthcare and pandemic prevention” and left those on the front line questioning why the medical system is still “so broken” after three years.

The country of more than 1.4 billion people spent enormous sums of money on building isolation facilities and makeshift hospitals, as well rolling out mass testing, over the course of its hardline zero-Covid strategy.

Guangdong province alone spent 71.1 billion yuan (US10.5 billion) on prevention and control last year, according to its fiscal report released in early January, an increase of 57 per cent on 2021. This almost doubled its cumulative spend for the last three years to 146.8 billion yuan.

Fujian province in southeast China also invested 13.04 billion yuan last year to tackle the coronavirus pandemic, up 56 per cent from 2021. Over the past three years, it has spent a total of 30.5 billion yuan, according to its fiscal report released in January.

China might have spent 25.4 billion yuan last year on the construction of makeshift hospitals, plus a total of 739.3 billion yuan on nucleic acid testing sites, which is higher than Luxembourg’s 2022 gross domestic product, according to a report by Minsheng Securities in May.

China, though, has a fiscal surplus of 2.4 trillion yuan and a 1 trillion yuan social security balance, which could guarantee coverage of Covid prevention, according to the report.

“Such coverage requires a prerequisite that the disruption to the economy from pandemic prevention does not deepen any further,” the report said.

“The pressure of pandemic prevention on fiscal revenues and expenditures will be in the short term, while more pressure will come from a decline in the revenue side of the equation.”

At the start of December, amid the latest surge in cases, the central government asked local authorities to ensure special needs beds made up 10 per cent of the total available when upgrading makeshift hospitals into sub-designated hospitals with medical resources.

"Our hospital was a mess, we didn’t know what was going on with the patients we were accepting" Dr Zhou

This followed a request for each province to establish at least two to three makeshift hospitals by the National Health Commission in March during the Omicron outbreak, when there were 33 makeshift hospitals with a total of 35,000 beds.

But after Beijing abruptly pivoted from its strict zero-Covid policy last month, a surge in infections overwhelmed hospitals and morgues, while many pharmacies also ran out of fever medication and painkillers.

The shortage of medical resources is “unlike anything I’ve seen in all my years in the medical field,” said Zhou, a doctor at a public hospital in a southern Chinese city, who declined to give his full name due to the sensitivity of the matter.

“We issued nearly 80 death certificates in one week, but we normally only issue one or two per month,” he said. “We even ran out of special paper for death certificates and had to write temporary copies.”

After zero-Covid was abandoned, Zhou said he and his colleagues were simply confused, as they had not systematically studied Sars-Covid treatment during the three-year pandemic.

“Our hospital was a mess, we didn’t know what was going on with the patients we were accepting and we were scrambling our ventilators when patients needed intubation,” said Zhou.

According to the doctor, the makeshift hospitals played a relatively effective role at the beginning of the pandemic, as they were able to quarantine infected patients to prevent the spread of the virus.

“But we haven’t established a medical system that can defend against the coronavirus in these three years, the role of the makeshift hospital is very limited since what the patients need more is actually oxygen masks and ventilators,” said Zhou.

“If China had spent more than 730 billion yuan on medicine [research and development], the expansion of ICU beds, and the recruitment and training of medical staff, the current medical system would not be so broken.”

A total of 63 makeshift hospitals were tendered for construction across China as part of the 20 measures Beijing announced in November to ease virus restrictions, with contracts worth nearly 393 million yuan, according to the Post’s calculations from Chinese government tender bidding website Qianlima. A total of 20 contracts were awarded.

After Beijing rolled out an additional 10 measures at the start of December, the Chinese government invited bids for construction of 46 more makeshift hospitals, worth 427 million yuan, with 18 winning bids.

The cost of a single bed in a makeshift hospital is 38,000 yuan, compared to around 95,000 yuan for a bed in a new hospital, which comes mainly from local finance or bank loans, according to a study by Huachuang Securities in April last year.

"Three years of pandemic have amply exposed China’s serious infrastructure deficiencies in healthcare" Yu Yongding

“China does not have a problem with overinvestment in infrastructure, and three years of pandemic have amply exposed China’s serious infrastructure deficiencies in healthcare and pandemic prevention,” said Yu Yongding, a member of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences at a conference held by Renmin University on January 17.

Makeshift hospitals could be helpful if the policy aims to isolate infected patients, provide treatment and prevent onward transmissions, especially when containment is still achievable, according to Dr. Hui-Ling Yen, an associate professor at the School of Public Health at the University of Hong Kong.

“China has been very successful in keeping the virus at bay for a very long time,” said Yen, who believes the pandemic situation is difficult to gauge.

“People tend to follow the same strategies if they have been proven useful. This may be a good lesson to remind ourselves while preparing for the next pandemic.”

New Coronavirus News from 25 Jan 2023

North Korea locks down capital Pyongyang over respiratory illness [The Guardian, 25 Jan 2023]

Authorities in the North Korean capital, Pyongyang, have ordered a five-day lockdown due to rising cases of an unspecified respiratory illness, Seoul-based NK News reported on Wednesday, citing a government notice.

The notice did not mention Covid-19, but said that residents in the city were required to stay in their homes until the end of Sunday and submit to temperature checks multiple times each day, according to NK News, which monitors North Korea.

On Tuesday, the website reported that Pyongyang residents appeared to be stocking up on goods in anticipation of stricter measures. It was unclear if other areas of North Korea had imposed new lockdowns.

North Korea acknowledged its first Covid-19 outbreak in 2022 but by August had declared victory over the virus.

The secretive regime never confirmed how many people caught Covid, apparently because it lacks the means to conduct widespread testing.

Instead it reported daily numbers of patients with fever, a tally that rose to 4.77 million out of a population of about 25 million. But it has not reported such cases since 29 July.

State media have continued to report on anti-pandemic measures to battle respiratory diseases, including the flu, but had yet to report on the lockdown order.

On Tuesday, state news agency KCNA said the city of Kaesong, near the border with South Korea, had intensified public communication campaigns “so that all the working people observe anti-epidemic regulations voluntarily in their work and life”.

North Korea locks down capital due to ‘respiratory illness’ outbreak [FRANCE 24 English, 25 Jan 2023]

North Korea has ordered a five-day lockdown in the capital over "respiratory illness", a report said Wednesday, in what appears to be the first citywide restrictions since the country declared victory over Covid-19 in August 2022.

Residents of Pyongyang have been ordered to stay in their homes from Wednesday to Sunday and must submit to multiple temperature checks each day, Seoul-based specialist site NK News reported, citing a government notice.

The notice did not mention Covid but said that the illnesses currently spreading in the capital included the common cold, the report said.

The government order comes a day after NK News, citing sources in Pyongyang, reported that people in the city appeared to be stocking up on goods in anticipation of a lockdown.

It is unclear if other areas have imposed similar lockdowns and state media has not announced any new measures.

Experts suggested that North Korea's largest city is likely dealing with the re-emergence of Covid.

"Covid is disappearing and reappearing depending on the temperature, not just in North Korea but around the world," said Go Myong-hyun, a researcher at the Asan Institute for Policy Studies.

The Korean peninsula is currently in the grip of what weather forecasters have described as a Siberian cold snap, with temperatures in Pyongyang dropping as low as -22 degrees Celsius (-7.6 Fahrenheit).

"It was quite premature for North Korea to celebrate its victory over the virus... with the drop in temperature, Covid has re-emerged," Go told AFP.

"North Korea must have prepared for it to some extent, but it seems that the virus reappeared a little sooner than they thought."

China trade
North Korea's neighbour and key trading partner China recently abandoned its zero-Covid policies, and battled a wave of infections that overwhelmed hospitals and crematoriums.

North Korea has maintained a rigid blockade since the start of the pandemic, but does allow some trade with China.

In May last year, North Korea officially acknowledged its first Covid outbreak but declared victory over the virus just three months later, calling it a "miracle".

Experts, including the World Health Organization, have long questioned Pyongyang's Covid statistics and claims to have brought the outbreak under control.

North Korea has one of the world's worst healthcare systems, with poorly equipped hospitals, few intensive care units and no Covid treatment drugs, experts say.

It is not believed to have vaccinated any of its 25 million people, although reports indicate it may have received some vaccines from China.

Report of lockdown suggests North Korea may be quietly grappling with a COVID resurgence [CBS News, 25 Jan 2023]

Seoul — North Korea has ordered a five-day lockdown in the capital over "respiratory illness", a report said Wednesday, in what appears to be the first citywide restrictions since the country declared victory over COVID-19 in August 2022. Residents of Pyongyang have been ordered to stay in their homes from Wednesday to Sunday and must submit to multiple temperature checks each day, Seoul-based specialist site NK News reported, citing a government notice.

The notice did not mention COVID but said that the illnesses currently spreading in the capital included the common cold, the report said.

The government order comes a day after NK News, citing sources in Pyongyang, reported that people in the city appeared to be stocking up on goods in anticipation of a lockdown. It is unclear if other areas have imposed similar lockdowns and state media has not announced any new measures.

Experts suggested that North Korea's largest city is likely dealing with the re-emergence of COVID.

"COVID is disappearing and reappearing depending on the temperature, not just in North Korea but around the world," said Go Myong-hyun, a researcher at the Asan Institute for Policy Studies.

The Korean peninsula is currently in the grip of what weather forecasters have described as a Siberian cold snap, with temperatures in Pyongyang dropping as low as -22 degrees Celsius (-7.6 Fahrenheit).

"It was quite premature for North Korea to celebrate its victory over the virus... with the drop in temperature, COVID has re-emerged," Go told AFP. "North Korea must have prepared for it to some extent, but it seems that the virus reappeared a little sooner than they thought."

North Korea's neighbour and key trading partner China recently abandoned its zero-COVID policies, and battled a wave of infections that overwhelmed hospitals and crematoriums.

North Korea has maintained a rigid blockade since the start of the pandemic, but does allow some trade with China.

In May last year, North Korea officially acknowledged its first COVID outbreak but declared victory over the virus just three months later, calling it a "miracle."

Experts, including the World Health Organization, have long questioned Pyongyang's COVID statistics and claims to have brought the outbreak under control.

North Korea has one of the world's worst healthcare systems, with poorly equipped hospitals, few intensive care units and no COVID treatment drugs, experts say. It is not believed to have vaccinated any of its 25 million people, although reports indicate it may have received some vaccines from China.

New Coronavirus News from 24 Jan 2023

The next worrisome coronavirus variant could come from China — will it get detected? [Nature, 24 Jan 2023]

By Dyani Lewis

Genomic surveillance is crucial for tracking the next ‘variant of concern’, but many countries are winding back their monitoring.

Fears that the massive surge of coronavirus infections in China could immediately spark the emergence of a troubling new variant are unfounded, say researchers. But that could change in the coming months as more people in the country acquire some natural immunity from infection. More widespread immunity could drive the virus SARS-CoV-2 to evolve ways to evade these immune protections. It remains crucial that variants be tracked, yet scientists question how quickly the next variant of concern will be detected as many countries wind down surveillance efforts.

When China abruptly dropped its zero-COVID policy in December, most of its population had little immunity against the dominant Omicron variant in circulation worldwide. Under such circumstances, the emergence of a dangerous new variant is unlikely, says epidemiologist Jodie McVernon at the Doherty Institute in Melbourne, Australia. There should be less selection pressure for immune-evading variants to emerge in a such a population, she says.

Still, China is ramping up efforts to monitor variants circulating in its population, and has announced plans to have 3 hospitals in each of its 31 provinces genetically sequence virus samples collected from 15 outpatients, 10 people with severe COVID-19, and all people who have died from COVID-19 each week. But experts are divided on whether these plans will be enough to rapidly detect a concerning variant that could cause new waves of infection and death, in part because many other nations have reduced their genomic monitoring.

However, the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control has called on European countries to set up random testing of travellers from China, and sequence the virus from all positive samples, so that emerging variants can be detected. Other nations, including the United States, Japan and Australia, have also put surveillance measures in place for travellers from China.

Tracking a virus
Countries track variants by constantly sequencing a proportion of known infections and sharing those sequences in public repositories such as GISAID. During the first two years of the pandemic, most public-health agencies carried out targeted sequencing, monitoring people who had been hospitalized with COVID-19 with the aim of detecting new variants that might cause more-severe illness. Viruses collected from immunocompromised people, who can harbour infections for weeks or months, were also sequenced, because prolonged infections can give rise to heavily mutated viruses1,2.

Most nations also sequenced a representative sample of viruses from across the community, says Vitali Sintchenko, a microbiologist at the University of Sydney in Australia. In a study he co-authored, the researchers concluded that countries should aim to sequence 0.5% of COVID-19 cases and share that data within 21 days of collecting the samples. That would give them a 34% probability of detecting a new lineage before it infects 100 people3.

The study, which also looked at sequencing efforts in 189 countries up to the end of February 2022, found that during the first two years of the pandemic, 78% of high-income countries sequenced more than 0.5% of their COVID-19 cases, with some, including Denmark, Japan and the United Kingdom, consistently sequencing more than 5% of cases each week. The earlier such data are gathered and shared, the faster scientists can run laboratory tests to look at the new variant's immune evasion, resistance to antiviral drugs and ability to infect cells, says Sintchenko.

But the testing landscape has changed drastically over the past year, says evolutionary virologist Verity Hill at the Yale School of Public Health in New Haven, Connecticut. Broad-scale population-based screening was feasible in countries such as the United Kingdom because researchers could tap into samples collected at community-based PCR testing facilities. But in many countries authorities are no longer offering such services because of the expense and the decrease in demand, says Hill. And people are increasingly opting to self-test, using rapid antigen tests, or not test at all.

That means that detection of new variants is getting harder everywhere, says Sintchenko.

Red flags
Experts look for mutations in the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein, which allows the virus to enter host cells and is the main target of the body’s immune responses. A jump in the number of mutations in a new variant is one thing to watch out for, says Hill. “That’s a warning flag,” she says. The Omicron variant, which first appeared in a sequence from Botswana, had more than 30 mutations in its spike protein.

The World Health Organization (WHO) only designates a new ‘variant of concern’ if a variant is better at evading existing immune system protections, causes more severe disease or is much more transmissible than currently circulating variants.

Omicron not only contained many mutations, but also rapidly became a dominant variant in the population, suggesting it was spreading faster than, and out-competing, other variants in the community. The WHO designated Omicron a variant of concern within days of South African researchers alerting the international community to the variant’s rapid spread. But that came nearly three weeks after the first Omicron sequence was deposited into GISAID.

The Delta variant was designated a variant of concern in May 2021, seven months after the first known sample was collected in India. The first sign that there could be a concerning new variant around was a rapid rise in case numbers, hospitalizations and deaths in India at the start of 2021. “It's connecting case counts and genetics as much as you can,” says Hill.

Wait and see
So far, most of the sequences that China has submitted to GISAID since the beginning of December belong to Omicron subvariants already in circulation elsewhere. There are five new lineages — descendants of those subvariants — but these are unlikely to gain a foothold outside China because of pre-existing immunity.

But the decreased population-wide surveillance outside China makes it more likely that a variant that emerges in China might initially go undetected, says Hill.

Sintchenko says there are also concerns that China is not sharing enough of its sequences. At a 3 January meeting of the WHO’s Technical Advisory Group on Virus Evolution, scientists from the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention presented data based on more than 2,000 genomes collected and sequenced since 1 December 2022. But only around one-quarter of that number — 564 sequences — have been uploaded to GISAID’s database over the same period.

A COVID-19 researcher in China, who has asked to remain anonymous to avoid undue attention for weighing in on political matters, says that although current surveillance in China is insufficient, China is building its capacity and ramping up the number of sequences it uploads to GISAID each week.

References
1. Cele, S. et al. Cell Host Microbe 30, 154–162 (2022).
2. Chaguza, C. et al. Preprint at medRxiv https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.06.29.22276868 (2022).
3. Brito, A. F. et al. Nature Commun. 13, 7003 (2022).

Zoonotic Bird Flu News since 21 Dec 2022 till 3 Jan 2023

Avian Flu Isn't Just For the Birds [Bay Nature, 3 Jan 2023]

by Guanani Gomez-Van Cortright

As the latest strain of avian influenza?Gs/GD HPAI, it’s called?spreads through the U.S., birds are not the only creatures the virus has felled.

As of December 2022, the virus has been detected in a confirmed total of 53 red foxes in eight states. Other mammals have tested positive as well, including scavenger species, such as skunks and racoons, that have likely fed on potentially infected dead birds. So far, 10 species of land mammals have tested positive for the virus in the U.S.

Workers at the Dane County Humane Society in Wisconsin received call after call about red fox kits behaving oddly. The kits were strangely easy to approach, wandering alone, often stumbling or walking in circles. Some struggled to stand, salivated excessively, twitched, and even had seizures, symptoms often soon followed by death. The Humane Society facility admitted some of the sick kits and ruled out rabies and other potential causes before testing revealed that the young foxes were suffering from neurological symptoms triggered by Gs/GD HPAI. Possibly because of the young foxes’ underdeveloped immune systems, the virus proved particularly lethal to them.

In June, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration declared an unusual mortality event for gray seals and harbor seals, which were stranding on the beaches of Maine at three times the normal rate. Four of the eight beached seals tested were positive for Gs/GD HPAI, and over the next five months, over 300 seals were stranded. No birds were found in the stomachs of necropsied seals, but scientists believed the seals were catching the virus from contact with infected birds or their droppings when they came to shore.

Florida residents discovered a young male bottlenose dolphin trapped between a pier and a seawall in March. By the time rescuers got to the scene, the dolphin was dead. Bird flu wasn’t on their short list of possible culprits. But after researchers ruled out common causes and found high levels of inflammation in the dolphin’s brain during the necropsy, one researcher noted cases of avian influenza in wild seabirds in the area. The dolphin’s tissue samples tested positive for Gs/GD HPAI. The following September, Swedish researchers reported finding the virus in a stranded porpoise. These two cases marked the first time an avian influenza has ever been detected in cetaceans.

“We’ve had marine mammals that have been infected,” says Pitesky. “That gives me some pause.”

While it does sicken and kill mammals, Gs/GD HPAI does not seem to spread readily from one mammal to another. But the more spillover infections occur across animal classes, the higher the chances the virus could become capable of spreading between mammals as well.

“The worst-case scenario is, it finds its way to us,” says Richard Webby, an infectious disease and influenza expert at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee. “Those hosts, that’s a step closer to the virus changing from being a bird virus to being a human virus.”

That other pandemic: 2022 was worst year for bird flu this century [The Mendocino Voice, 3 Jan 2023]

By Frank Hartzell

MENDOCINO Co., 1/3/22 ? When one of Renne’s Clark’s ducks died this December, the Albion resident dutifully had it tested through her veterinarian, Village Vet in Mendocino. Then she got unexpected news ? her duck, sent to UC Davis, tested positive for H5N1, or avian flu. She quarantined her flock and observed them with no further deaths. But she took the precaution of warning other poultry keepers on Facebook’s Fort Bragg-Mendocino chicken group.

Clark explained in a recent interview that while she knew there were reasons not to use her name, she is more interested in issuing a call to arms to other poultry lovers.

“We’re taking the necessary steps to deal with it, but wanted to let the community know it’s here on the coast. It’s great that Davis offers free necropsies for dead poultry ? I’ve used it several times over the years,” the Albion resident wrote on Facebook.

At the same time as Clark told this reporter about her case, the California Department of Food and Agriculture announced that the first case of the current strain of avian flu in a domestic flock in Mendocino County was confirmed. Although the timing is right, state agricultural officials could not confirm whether that first case was Clark’s, or even where in the county the confirmation occurred. There is no proof that the two reports are the same.

Such confusion exemplifies the information fog around avian flu, ranging from public disinterest to the spin put on the subject by the commercial poultry industry. This avian flu epidemic was the worst ever among birds and many other species, and it only continues to rage in 2023. Outbreaks in Czechia and South Korea were reported on New Year’s Day, but the flu is not infecting many humans ? yet. It can get any mammal that is likely to touch sick or dead birds- including housecats.

Researchers like virologist Rob Wallace say factory farming of chickens and pigs poses a clear and present danger to humanity, one likely to increase with time. Wallace, credited with predicting the coronavirus pandemic, soon became a pariah in the scientific community where he had flourished for many years. Early research in HIV/AIDS and influenza led him to be a consultant for the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. His downfall came when he was tracking bird flu origins in China, asking questions that he says got him shut out from some industry-funded university programs.

Wallace says money, not science, determines where and what research is done, thus directing what courses are considered to save humanity from our unsustainable appetites and practices. Unfortunately, he says, the wrong choices are being made. He and many others, including people inside some of the largest industrial chicken and meat companies, have ideas that might create a less terrifying and more sustainable future. But the available public narrative places the blame for the spread of avian flu on wild birds and backyard flocks, ignoring the fact that both lived in harmony for millennia before the advent of Confined Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs). The fact that this avian flu pandemic hitting birds is the worst of the century and is worrying for the future, has gone mostly unnoticed due to pandemic news fatigue. Also lacking is credible information about what keeps causing avian flu, apart from books like Dr. Michael Greger’s Bird Flu: A Virus of Our Own Hatching or Wallace’s Big Farms Make Big Flu.

Meanwhile the chicken industry is not seriously considering changing its husbandry practices but instead is utilizing decades of research into gene editing to breed transgenic birds that can resist bird flu.

This flu broader and more deadly
The current outbreak of H5N1 is impacting a much wider array of species than past outbreaks. Even more ominous, it is killing wild birds and domestic ducks that normally survive it.

While H5N1 has infected just one human being so far in the USA ? a prisoner in Colorado assigned to cull chickens ? scientists are worried that a strain of avian flu could someday become a respiratory disease and cause a pandemic along the lines of Covid-19. The California Department of Food and Agriculture says the biggest concern is that people with human flu strains could be exposed to an infected bird, with the two diseases commingling to produce a dangerous new strain that spreads through the air in the way Covid and conventional flu strains are spread.

In 2014 H5N1 mostly disappeared, though it was replaced by H5N6 and H5N8 subtypes from 2014 through 2020. The epidemic of those two varieties wiped out 50 million birds in the Midwest, where factory farms are closer together, especially in Wisconsin and Iowa. California and the West were virtually untouched by those outbreaks.

However, in 2021 H5N1 emerged again in both Western Europe and East Asia. And in the meantime, it had evolved into something more deadly, likely inside Asian factory farms and outdoor markets, a true monster that attacks any mammal or bird that comes in direct contact with the corpses of the wild birds it kills. The virus was brought into factory farms by wild birds, then apparently escaped back out having now evolved to kill its hosts. Historically, avian flus did not kill or even sicken wild birds, and backyard chickens largely survived outbreaks that whirled around the globe.

A wide variety of mammals have been exposed to these dead birds and caught avian flu, which some scientists had thought was not possible. The following, provided to the Voice by the state Department of Food and Agriculture, lists mammal species infected by the current avian flu through December: American black bear, Amur leopard, Bobcat, bottlenose dolphin, Dixie striped skunk and virginia opossum, coyote, fisher, gray seal, harbor seal, raccoon, red fox, all animals believed to have gotten the avian flu directly from wild bird carcasses.

Hon Ip, who runs one of the best sources of information, the Facebook group “Avian Influenza, a.k.a bird flu,” provided US year-end stats for the bizarre worldwide interspecies phenomenon. “There were 98 highly pathogenic avian influenza detections in wild mammals in 2022. These came from 15 states, with Maine and Wisconsin tied at 17 detections each. The 98 detections came from 13 different species of mammals, with red fox making up 54 percent of the total.”

There have been only four human confirmed cases of this outbreak of H1N5 worldwide, two serious with one death and two less serious. To some, this means the disease has less potential human harm than other manifestations of bird flu, including earlier more fatal H151 rounds. To others, it means people have become smarter about handling dead birds. The mortality rate from human avian flu cases from 21st century varieties has been a horrifying 60 percent, according to the World Health Organization.

As of December 22, there have been 192 confirmed detections in wild birds in 37 California counties, including one bird in Mendocino County, since the first confirmed detection on July 13, according to the California Department of Food and Agriculture. People are warned to stay away from the carcasses of birds and leave handling to professionals wearing PPE.

In an interview, Laura Bradley, public information officer for California Department of Food & Agriculture Animal Health Branch, said there had not been any flock-to-flock transmission observed as of Dec. 22, only domestic poultry likely getting the disease from wild birds. Clark had not seen wild ducks with her birds, but Bradley said that is often the case, as the disease can be transmitted from the droppings of waterfowl flying over a backyard flock. A list of wild bird species carrying and often being killed by the disease can be found on the USDA APHIS website: https://www.aphis.usda.gov/animal_health/animal_diseases/avian/images/hpai-wild-birds-map.png

This variant is long-lasting
Another worrisome factor about the current avian flu pandemic is that it has been around for two years, while past manifestations lasted a single flu season. By December the global bird flu outbreak had killed hundreds of millions of chickens and turkeys worldwide. (Bradley pointed out that everything about avian flu is measured by its impact on chickens.)

That Clark’s duck was apparently the first recorded case in Mendocino County and just one case has been confirmed here in a wild bird (unknown area of the county), highlights the fact that California has been largely left out of the global H151 pandemic (at least among chickens).

Bird flu travels by the migratory routes of waterfowl, along the Pacific and Central flyways. The Mississippi Flyway, which includes the Midwestern states where chickens and eggs are largely raised, has seen chicken populations hit harder by the avian flu, as has much of Europe and Asia. But the number of cases in wild birds is similar along the nation’s flyways in 2022.

California’s stronger regulatory structure and greater biosecurity measures by the chicken industry may have helped keep avian flu from killing chickens in the numbers that the Midwest has seen. Avian flu has been found in US commercial and backyard poultry in 44 states and in wild birds in 46 states since early 2022.

This is a huge jump over the last time avian flu created major problems for the poultry industry. The number of chickens, turkeys and other fowl that were killed or died from the bird flu in the USA became the highest ever this December at more than 58 million, surpassing 2015’s total chicken deaths.

This number, relatively low when wild and domestic outbreaks are compared over time, is considered a victory for US reporting and observation practices by government agencies like CDFA, USDA and CDFA, and measures taken by the poultry industry to make factory farms more biosecure. Yet the industry continues to blame backyard flocks and wild birds in its science and media releases. A solution now proposed by industrial interests is mandatory worldwide vaccinations of chickens. This is seen by critics as impractical and possibly obfuscating the real issue; they say a more likely solution is reforming free trade away from pure profit to more sustainable farming practices.

Wallace says in Big Farms, Big Flu that blaming wild birds is a distraction that can no longer be tolerated. Wild birds bring bird flu in “low pathogenic” form to backyard flocks, which can acquire some immunity, as they are often older birds exposed to more diverse conditions.

Industrial flocks, slaughtered after 6-8 weeks for meat chickens to 1-2 years for egg chickens, have very low genetic diversity or variety, which makes it easier for pathogens to get at their immune systems. When the jump is made to the CAFOs, the low pathogenic becomes the deadly “highly pathogenic.” That has been the story in the past, confirmed by research in the Midwest, but this current deadlier virus does not seem to have a low pathogenic component. Bradley said she has only seen cases of highly pathogenic H5N1 in this cycle. Backyard flocks like Clark’s are also both more healthy and better spaced than the industrial model, making their experience with disease different. One duck died, with the rest of Clark’s flock not even showing signs of illness.

In a speech on YouTube, Dr. Michael Greger, author of Bird Flu: a VIrus of Our Own Hatching, said, “The emergence of H5N1 has been widely blamed on free-ranging flocks and wild birds.

This is somehow the fault of people… keeping chickens in the backyard for thousands of years. Birds have been migrating for millions of years. Bird flu has been accompanying them. What suddenly turned bird flu into a killer? Now we put millions of chickens into a chicken factory next door to a pig factory,” he continued. “These chicken factories make billions and billions of these mutations continuously. … The big shift in the ecology of avian influenza has been this intensification of the global poultry sector.”

Greger was praised for his viewpoint by many researchers, including an editorial in Virology journal. Others replay the official line that bird flu comes from mutations in the breeding grounds of migratory waterfowl. Wallace points out that money determines what is studied in labs and universities and what boundaries are pushed. He says most research money goes into vaccines that benefit big Pharma, not into the problem’s source or sustainable solutions.

Lessening the immune response
Chickens in CAFOs are not exposed to the outside and its natural strengthening of the immune system.They have closely matching genetics and they were not bred for the health of the birds. These conditions help evolve much more virulent viruses. Viruses are less virulent in nature because they cannot kill the host or they die themselves.

“In nature, there’s kind of a limit to how virulent these viruses can get,” said Greger. “Or at least there was, until now. Enter intensive poultry production when the next host is just inches away. There may be no limit to how nasty these viruses can get. Evolutionary biologists refer to this as the key to the emergence of hypervirulent so-called predator-type viruses, like HIV.”

Greger continued, “When you have a situation where the healthy cannot escape the disease, where the virus can just knock you flat and still transmit to someone else just because it’s so crowded, then there may be no stopping rapidly mutating viruses from becoming truly ferocious.”

The worst avian flu pandemic and worst overall pandemic in human history was in 1918-20 when a strain of probable avian flu killed 50 million people. Of course, there was no such thing as a CAFO in 1918. The deadly mutations are believed to have come from the packed conditions of troops fighting World War I. The virus spread in barracks and battlefields. This reporter’s great uncle, Floyd Sturm, died from the misnomered “Spanish Flu” in 1918 on his way to war.

“Just like the chickens when this harmless virus found itself in these packed conditions, it mutated and became more deadly,” Greger said. “Millions of soldiers were forced together in these stressful unhygienic conditions with no escaping a sick car. The same trench warfare conditions exist today in every industrial egg operation.”

While it’s not 100 percent sure that Spanish Flu was an avian flu variety that jumped into humans, the consensus among scientists now is that is exactly what happened. Here is a link to a study about the topic in the prestigious science journal Nature. The CDC definitively lists the 1918 pandemic as being an avian originated flu.

Industrial methods create breeding grounds for disease
Omnivores all, chickens, pigs and humans, have some similarities in their respiratory and digestive systems on a molecular level. As these viruses rip through packed chickens, they create something much more virulent, and that virulence could jump to humans. One study, conducted by universities in the USA and China, was suppressed as the information on how avian flu could become a respiratory disease was deemed too dangerous to be released.

These are the kind of alarm bells about the potential of avian flu that Dr. Greger and Wallace warn are being ignored at great potential peril to humanity’s future. Each book offers ways to change meat production and reduce meat consumption. But chicken farming took off in an even bigger way during the pandemic, and CAFO chicken farming is spreading in south Asia with increasing demand for meat. The chicken is also the creature on which genetic engineering is most commonly done. It is unknown the effect transgenic chickens might have on bird flu or other diseases that threaten humans, such as salmonella strains that have become highly virulent and antibiotic-resistant due to CAFO practices. Some in the industry are advocating the creation of new transgenic chicken varieties to resist the bird flu, without changing the conditions that cause it.

? Affected numbers in the United States
1. 2015 HPAI
a. 15 states affected
b. 21 backyard flocks
c. 211 commercial flocks
d. Total birds affected: 50.4 M

2. 2022 HPAI (as of 12/21/22)
a. 47 states affected
b. 404 backyard flocks
c. 303 commercial flocks
d. Total birds affected: 57.82 M

? Affected numbers in California (backyard flock will be denoted as BYF)
1. 2015 HPAI
a. 1 backyard flock
b. 1 commercial flock
c. Total birds affected: 247,201
2. 2022 HPAI (as of 12/21/22)
a. 43 affected counties (domestic, wild, or both)
b. Total birds affected (as of 12/21/22): 719,680
c. Butte County: 2 BYF ? 1,120 birds
d. Calaveras County: 1 BYF ? 20 birds
e. Contra Costa County: 1 BYF ? 60 birds
f. Del Norte County: 1 BYF ? 43,000 birds
g. El Dorado County: 1 BYF ? 150
h. Fresno County: 6 commercial, 1 BYF ? 166,200 birds
i. Mendocino County: 1 BYF ? 20
j. Monterey County: 1 commercial ? 15,100 birds
k. Sacramento County: 1 commercial, 2 BYF: 97,060 birds
l. San Diego County: 1 BYF: 150 birds
m. Stanislaus County: 2 commercial ? 105,900 birds
n. Tuolumne County: 4 commercial ? 290,900 birds

Creating Disease Resistant Chickens: A Viable Solution to Avian Influenza? ? PMC
Almost all flu varieties that infect humans originate in China and other packed parts of Asia, creating mutations that require a new flu vaccine every year. Flu mutates so quickly that it is impossible to be sure that vaccines (or genetically altered chickens) will work against fast-changing strains.

CAFOS were actually stopped cold by a virus shortly after they were invented in Delaware in the 1920s. Large chicken operations suffered total losses of their birds from a virus called Marek’s disease. Researchers believe that Marek’s disease only began to evolve when factory farms were created. A vaccine for Marek’s saved the industry. However, Marek’s disease has been spread to every corner of the world by the chicken industry, especially industrial hatcheries. Now no one can raise chickens without fear of Marek’s disease. Although Marek’s seems to pose no risk to humans, the New York Times did an investigative story into the frightening things that has happened in the evolution of Marek’s that scientists thought impossible for any virus. The Merck veterinary manual says the following about Marek’s disease, wholly created by the chicken CAFOs and now spawning super deadly variants inside chicken factories. “Marek’s Disease is identified in chicken flocks worldwide. Every flock, except for those maintained under strict pathogen-free conditions, is presumed to be infected.”

Large chicken farms have also created massive numbers of new strains of human-sickening bacteria like salmonella, E. coli and Campylobacter. Overuse of antibiotics made these bacteria evolve into strains that are now untreatable by medicine. Although antibiotic use has been greatly curtailed in the USA and Europe, the CAFO industry has been growing exponentially in China, Thailand, Indonesia and Vietnam, where many controls are not in place.

Free trade rules are written by the global meat industry. This reporter, when he raised chickens and eggs for the farmers’ market, found the industry had made it illegal to sell to grocery stores and restaurants unless I chose to drive chickens more than 200 miles to an industrial inspection facility, where they might get their first exposure to industrial pathogens. Chicken raisers in countries like South Africa that signed neo-liberal free trade agreements soon found it impossible to compete with giant industrial concerns. Others, in places like Gambia, can raise chickens in traditional ways and sell to anyone, because their nation did not sign free trade treaties that kill the small farm. Many of these nations have never had large outbreaks of H151. (there was an outbreak in Senegal).

In March 2009, the first case of a novel H1N1 influenza virus infection was reported in the Mexican state of Veracruz. The virus quickly spread through Mexico and the United States, and in June 2009 the World Health Organization officially declared it a pandemic. Within a year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates, it had killed about 575,000 people worldwide.

Early reports suggested that the source of the outbreak lay in the factory-style pig farms in the area around its epicenter in Veracruz. In-depth research traced the genetic lineage of the virus to a strain that had emerged in a supersized industrial hog farm in Newton Grove, North Carolina, in the late 1990s, where it had circulated and evolved among pigs before crossing to humans.

Industry writes the rules
Materials considered by the creators of the Paris climate accords were written by the meat industry, with claims that industrial meat chickens are better for the climate. The chickens were described as better because they moved less and ate less and thus created less carbon, an outright lie easily disproved by the tremendous consumption of food by the genetically engineered meat chicken, available on any chart used by industry itself. The notion that grass-fed cattle, pigs allowed to forage and pasture, and integrated farms could actually help with climate change was discarded due to meat industry pressures. This reporter obtained the language about agriculture that was considered in the secret meetings held that led to the Paris accords. The following published journal article documents the secrecy and the compromises that led to a Paris agreement that is not enforceable and does not confront issues like factory farming.

The actual Paris accords missed what may have been a key opportunity to take a stance on improving agricultural methods and punted on the entire subject, with agriculture not even appearing in the actual agreement. It did commit to reducing meat-eating overall but initiatives led by industrial agriculture and the Gates foundation have pushed for large scale, industrial monocrops and the destruction of the movement toward local farming. Now, it’s agriculture that is said to be the biggest threat to the Paris agreements. With nothing in the agreements, many nations in Southeast Asia, Africa and South America have greatly increased the size and number of their CAFOS.

Intensive farming worldwide threatens Paris climate accord, report says
What kind of wild birds are being infected?

“Waterfowl species are the natural host of avian influenza viruses, so we tend to see most infections among species of waterfowl,” said Krysta Rogers, senior environmental scientist with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. “Other species that share habitat with waterfowl may also be susceptible, such as other water birds like American white pelicans, herons, egrets, and cormorants. Also, species that prey or scavenge on sick birds such as bald eagles, hawks, falcons, owls, turkey vultures, and ravens.” Rogers emphasized that all statistics rely on people reporting dead birds, which often doesn’t happen in the wide open spaces of the North Coast area.

“Testing of wild birds is generally biased towards areas with higher human populations. Areas with more people means the bird is more likely to be detected and submitted for testing versus an area with fewer people. As of December 22, the number of confirmed detections in wild birds for Mendocino County is 1, Del Norte County is 0, Humboldt County is 6, Lake County is 0, and Sonoma County is 8,” she said.

Mapping studies indicate this particular strain may have come from both Asia and Europe to the USA.“The strain of highly pathogenic avian influenza H5N1 currently in circulation has not been previously detected in North America. Prior to its detection along the Atlantic Coast in December 2021 (Canada) and January 2022 (U.S.), detections of this strain of highly pathogenic H5N1 had been on the rise across parts of Europe,” she said.

“This current outbreak is unprecedented in terms of the geographic range, diversity of wild birds potentially impacted, and number of wild birds that may die from infection,” she said. “Prior to this outbreak, highly pathogenic avian influenza viruses were considered more of a disease of domestic poultry with occasional spill-over into wild birds which may or may not have caused mortality.”

Operations in Europe have greatly increased biosecurity and worked toward easing the misery and ill health conditions that meat and egg chickens are raised in. This has also happened in California but has been resisted in the farm belt of the USA. During the Trump Administration, measures to regulate the chicken industry were discarded or slowed in favor of making the USA more competitive in the worldwide chicken trade.
What is the solution?
While industry seeks pharmaceutical and bioengineering solutions to specific issues such as transitioning away from antibiotics or bird flu, this does not solve the causal problems with CAFOs. A current bill sponsored by Bay Area Democratic Congressman Ro Khanna and New Jersey Democratic Senator Cory Booker would force existing USA CAFOs to cease operating in that fashion by 2040. But is the problem consumers or CAFOs? As a farmer’s market chicken seller, I got frowns for charging $6 per pound for meat from chickens that lived happy lives outdoors with real nutrition.

During that period, I interviewed a chicken company president who said I could use his name if the article blamed not the industry, but on the consumer demand for $2 per pound chicken. He was right. The enemy, as Pogo said, is us.

The president was part of an industry group trying to interest consumers in better-tasting chicken. The effort largely failed. US chicken companies were sued and prosecuted after Walmart complained they were working together to raise prices. Meanwhile, European chicken producers are downsizing chicken operations but the cost of the chicken they sell must be government-subsidized to be affordable. And free trade brings in super cheap chicken from the world’s largest and worst CAFOs in Vietnam and Indonesia.

Industry leaders say that free trade agreements must be rewritten to force these countries, which are using the USA CAFO model and often working for USA corporations, to create smaller and healthier poultry factories. This crashes headlong into conservative forces that don’t believe in regulation. Even more powerful opposition comes from neoliberal forces, led by Bill Gates and his foundation, that believe bigger is better and work against the continuation of traditional farming practices in favor of genetic engineering, processed fake meat and other fake foods made from genetically modified soybeans. Their plans call for the massive planting of monocrops in the global South, decimating Amazon rainforests and remaining African savannas and jungles.

To some, Gates and his technology will save the world from hunger and global warming in much the way the chemical “green revolution” did with monocrops and sprays in the 1970s. To others, Gates is just creating another type of too big, badly scaled, overly processed and unhealthy food. Critics like Wallace suggest that global agriculture should be forced to pay its real costs including sewage, insect and air pollution. Operations creating weak, sick animals should be regularly tested for the creation of new pathogens and taxed for the cost of those diseases. Authorities already track new strains of the likes of salmonella, and tie them directly to the source, which is usually an industrial hatchery.

In the journal Global Jurist, Federico Regaldo cites CAFOs for pandemics and epidemics they create. Who is Going to Pay for Causing Pandemics?

Throughout human history, animal diseases like smallpox, measles and bubonic plague have been among the worst humans faced. But in the last 50 years, the situation has dramatically worsened.

According to a July 2020 report from the United Nations, three out of four of all “new and emerging human infectious diseases” are zoonotic in origin, and a study in the journal Nature found that agriculture was associated with half of all the zoonotic pathogens that emerged in humans. In Wallace’s view, this increase is “concurrent” with the livestock revolution, the expansion and consolidation of the meat sector that began in the 1970s in the southeastern United States and then spread around the world. Wallace asks how profitable it is to create low-priced food that can kill a billion people. It’s a question we all need to face.

Bird Flu Outbreaks Reach Record 54 in Japan This Season [Nippon.com, 3 Jan 2023]

Tokyo, Jan. 3 (Jiji Press)--The number of outbreaks of highly pathogenic avian influenza in Japan this season has risen to 54, topping the existing record of 52, logged in the 2020-2021 season, it was learned Tuesday.

The total number of birds destroyed due to this season's outbreaks is expected to reach around 7.75 million.

On the day, the prefectural government of Fukuoka in southwestern Japan announced that a bird flu outbreak had occurred at an emu farm in the city of Koga.

Highly pathogenic bird flu was also confirmed at an egg-laying hen farm in the city of Asahi, Chiba Prefecture, east of Tokyo, the same day.

The outbreaks were the 53rd and 54th in the country this season, with about 400 and 9,600 birds to be destroyed at Fukuoka and Chiba, respectively.

7.7 million birds culled in Japan as bird flu continues to spread [INQUIRER.net, 3 Jan 2023]

TOKYO ? Highly pathogenic avian influenza has been raging at poultry farms and facilities across Japan this season, with both the number of outbreaks and that of culled birds increasing at a record pace since late October.

Five prefectures that had never before experienced bird flu outbreaks at poultry farms have confirmed infections for the first time.

The central government has launched an emergency disinfection program nationwide.

However, local governments, which are responsible for culling massive numbers of chickens, have been calling for help, saying that the number of birds is more than they can cope with. Concern is also spreading among poultry farmers.

Limitations of Response
“The current situation [surrounding the culling of domestic poultry] has reached a stage at which local governments can no longer handle it on their own. I would like you to reconsider the approach so far,” Ibaraki Gov. Kazuhiko Oigawa said Dec. 21 at the Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries Ministry in Kasumigaseki, Tokyo.

Model-trader slay stirs Davao City
Ibaraki is the nation’s largest producer of hens’ eggs. On Nov. 4, an outbreak of bird flu occurred at a poultry farm in Kasumigaura in the prefecture. It took 19 days to kill 1.03 million egg-laying hens, bury and incinerate them, and disinfect the facilities.

Gov. Oigawa asked agricultural minister Tetsuro Nomura for certain requirements to be included in guidelines to be set forth by the central government for large-scale farms, conceived with poultry farms raising over 500,000 birds in mind. Specifically, secure enough workers in advance to cull their birds and prepare lime for disinfection and protective clothing at their own expense.

Nomura told a press conference after the Cabinet meeting on Dec. 27, “We must respond with a sense of urgency because the critical time is approaching.”

‘We can only pray’ The first cases of bird flu at poultry farms and facilities in Japan this season were confirmed in the prefectures of Okayama and Hokkaido on Oct. 28.

On Dec. 30, new outbreaks were detected in Saitama and Hiroshima prefectures, bringing the total number to 51 outbreaks in 22 prefectures as of the day. The outbreaks in Yamagata, Fukushima, Tottori, Nagasaki, and Okinawa were the first ever recorded in those prefectures.

As of the end of 2022, a total of 7.72 million birds had been culled nationwide. The current surge is likely to exceed the previous worst registered between November 2020 and March 2021, when a total of 52 outbreaks occurred in 18 prefectures and 9.87 million birds were culled.

In Aomori Prefecture, 1.39 million egg-laying hens that were being raised at a poultry farm in Misawa were killed over two weeks from Dec. 15, a record number at a single farm.

Ken Sasaki, chairman of the poultry association of Aomori Prefecture and the operator of a poultry farm in Hachinohe said, “We don’t know when or where an outbreak will occur. Ultimately, we can only pray.”

Earlier than usual
Avian influenza is spread by migratory birds that fly southward from their nesting grounds in Siberia, Russia. Wild birds and small animals become infected with the virus, and then bring it into poultry farms and elsewhere.

Outbreak season in Japan is therefore from late fall to spring. In Europe, however, outbreaks continued this summer, though not in large numbers, and there is no “off-season” anymore. In France, as many as 1,487 bird flu outbreaks were recorded at poultry farms in the slightly more than a year from October 2021.

“This season, infected wild birds were found in late September, the earliest time of year on record in Japan. Migratory birds have spread the virus to various regions much earlier than usual,” said Hiroki Takakuwa, a professor of veterinary microbiology at Kyoto Sangyo University.

In late December, the agricultural ministry began emergency disinfection at poultry farms nationwide, including those in prefectures that had not reported infections thus far. The ministry provides poultry farmers with lime for disinfection free of charge, encouraging them to spray it themselves.

Impact on egg prices
According to JA Zen-Noh Tamago (Eggs) based in Tokyo, the wholesale price of hens’ eggs has been hovering above normal since the spring of 2022, apparently affected by the soaring prices of compound feed due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The average price of medium-size eggs for December was \284 per kilogram in the Tokyo area, the highest monthly average since wholesale prices were first released in 1993. In addition to demand reaching its peak during the Christmas and New Year holiday seasons, “the bird flu has undoubtedly pushed up prices,” an industry official said.

Price increases are expected to level off later this month, when demand is expected to calm down, but the agricultural ministry official said, “We need to carefully watch the trends, based partly on the infection situation.”

‘The equivalent to our Covid pandemic’: bird flu hasn’t gone away and is still spreading [The Guardian, 24 Dec 2022]

By Phoebe Weston

It is more than a year since avian flu began to devastate wild birds in large numbers, and conservationists are fearful of what 2023 will hold. The highly infectious variant of H5N1 has caused Europe’s worst bird flu season and has spread across the globe with little sign of slowing.

In the UK, there were reports of some great skua dying from the H5N1 variant in the summer of 2021 but the mass die-offs started in the autumn and winter. More than a third of Svalbard barnacle geese in the Solway Firth, on the border of England and Scotland, ? 16,500 out of 43,000 ? died last winter.

A year later, there has been no letup, with Greenland barnacle geese on the Scottish island of Islay (the other main site where these geese overwinter) dropping dead in increasingly large numbers. “I’m sitting with a sense of dread that it definitely will get worse as I see more reports coming in from reserves across the UK,” says Claire Smith from RSPB Scotland. “I’m haunted by the numbers of dead great skua that I saw on Shetland in the summer and I’m avoiding going birdwatching on the coast.”

From April to mid-August 2022 avian flu ravaged colonies of seabirds in the UK, peaking in June at the height of the breeding season. These birds had previously been affected by H5N1 at very low levels. Seabirds generally migrate over summer, so numbers dropped again, but already there are outbreaks across the country among wintering waterbirds (which typically gather in large flocks, making them more vulnerable at this time of year). There have been cases in the south-west, the Midlands, East Anglia, Wales and the Isle of Man, each with numbers in the tens or low hundreds of dead water birds, with greylag geese, pink-footed geese, Canada geese and mute swans among the most affected.

Red-listed herring gulls across the north-east are already being impacted, with dead puffins washing up in Norfolk, which is unusual at this time of year when there is no stormy weather. They are yet to be tested, but the presumed cause of death is bird flu.

Cases in other groups of birds have been reported all over the country, and the RSPB called for a temporary ban on the release of game birds this year, to lessen the risk of spreading avian flu, but this was not taken up by government. Positive tests in peregrine falcons, buzzards, wild tawny owls and rooks have been recorded in recent months. Although there are not the same big die-offs, there are a lot of cases over a wide area, with more in urban and semi-urban areas. Positive tests are not an indication of the actual number of birds affected because few carcasses are found, let alone tested.

“We can expect HPAI [highly pathogenic avian influenza] to persist into the next breeding season and beyond, with unpredictable consequences,” a report from the International Seabird Group conference warned in November.

This will be the equivalent to our Covid pandemic, because we’re dealing with major outbreaks, major fatalities …
Prof Kin-Chow Chang, University of Nottingham

It is a case of waiting to see what happens next, says Prof Ian Brown, head of virology at the government’s Animal and Plant Health Agency (APHA). Commercial hens can be shut up, but you cannot control the movement of wild birds.

“That horse has bolted,” he says. “It is unusual that this particular event is dominated by one particular strain over such a big geographical area. I can’t remember any time since 1996 [when H5N1 started], where a single strain has caused so much global spread.”

Bird flu is highly infectious, with scientists saying one bird can infect as many as 100, with the virus present in faeces, mucus, blood and saliva. “You need a very tiny quantity ? a teaspoon of faeces will probably be enough to kill an entire house of chickens or turkeys,” says Brown.

The most common transmission between wild birds and poultry is probably indirectly, through birds in the nearby environment. Unpublished studies have shown that at 4C, the virus can stay in the environment for six weeks, according to Brown. It could be someone walking across a field and treading in infected bird droppings, and then failing to disinfect their boots before going into the poultry house. Or it could be transferred on bedding, or possibly via rodents.

Brown says that more than 99% of cases in poultry in the UK have come from wild birds. Apha knows this by working out the genome of a virus and comparing what it looks like in wild birds with its appearance in poultry. The researchers also look at the affected farm and possible routes of infection into poultry houses.

Prof Kin-Chow Chang, from the veterinary school at the University of Nottingham, agrees commercial populations are getting it either directly or indirectly from wild birds. “The virus is very infectious, it doesn’t need a lot to start an infection,” he says

Little is known about the number of birds with antibodies. Because vaccinations for wild birds are not considered a feasible option, they will need to get some sort of herd immunity. Brown says: “There is a very small proportion of birds that can get infected, can recover from infection and then have immunity which means they won’t get that virus again. And over time that would build, but we don’t understand that at all. We need to do further work. That research is being commissioned and happening across the world.”

The present variant of H5N1 originated in south-east Asia, where it was found in commercial geese. For the past four years, these strains of avian flu have been highly pathogenic, meaning they cause severe disease and death. Scientists at the University of Edinburgh are trying to work out why the current strain is causing longer and larger outbreaks than those that came before, which will also help understand how the disease will evolve and spread in the future.

It could be down to changes in the surface proteins on the virus, meaning they can more easily attach to wild birds, or it may be more stable in the environment, so the virus could live in a pond over summer rather than breaking down in warm temperatures and sunlight as have previous bird flu viruses. It may become less damaging when sufficient numbers of birds have been infected, or the virus could evolve again, making it easier to spill into other species ? including mammals and humans.

In August 2022, Defra said that mitigation strategies “are not very effective in reducing transmission within seabird colonies”. However, there are other ways to reduce the pressures seabirds are under, as they have already been hit by a range of threats including habitat loss, overfishing and the climate crisis. Since 1986, the UK’s population of breeding seabirds has fallen by almost a quarter. Reducing these other pressures would make them more resilient to bird flu, says Smith.

The RSPB says it is generally not picking up dead birds on its reserves because it risks the health of the people doing it, and causes disturbance among living birds which could spread the disease further. Visitors are asked to keep dogs on leads and to clean their shoes thoroughly before and after visiting. However, other wildlife groups, such as those working for the National Trust, have decided to collect carcasses because it could result in the disease spreading further if they are scavenged by others. Conservationists are calling for better monitoring and surveillance of the disease in wild birds, as well as clearer arrangements for carcass collection.

Chang says: “This will be the equivalent to our Covid pandemic, because we’re dealing with major outbreaks, major fatalities, and possibly major disruption to the domestic poultry production market as well.”

Bird flu strikes five more farms [台北時報, 24 Dec 2022]

By Yang Yuan-ting and Jonathan Chin / Staff reporter, with staff writer

VIRAL SPREAD: The latest outbreak has so far affected 39 farms, including 25 chicken farms, 10 duck farms and four goose farms, the Council of Agriculture said

The H5N1 avian influenza virus has been found in five more poultry farms, extending an outbreak that marks the first time the strain has made the leap from waterfowl to farmed landfowl in Taiwan, the Council of Agriculture (COA) said yesterday.

The infection clusters were found in one duck and three free-range chicken farms in Erlin Township (二林), and one goose farm in Pusin Township (埔心), all in Changhua County, COA Deputy Minister Huang Chin-cheng (?金城) said.

The rise in cases shows that avian flu is spreading in Taiwan, although outbreaks have been contained, he said.

Authorities have ruled out the possibility that the latest H5N1 cases were transmitted from a previous cluster in Yilan County, and wild waterfowl remains the most likely vector, Huang said.

The vector for the outbreak in chicken farms was either virus-bearing wild birds that entered the farms through gaps in coop netting or poultry workers who were exposed to the pathogen, he said.

The chicken-raising Erlin and Jhutang (竹塘) townships in Changhua County were flagged as hot zones for increased monitoring and sterilization, he added.

The H5N1 pandemic has impacted the farming of chicken and eggs in the US, Europe and Japan. Last month, Taiwan reported the year’s first cluster of the disease at a duck farm in Yilan County.

The latest outbreak brings the total number of farms affected in Taiwan to 39 ? 25 chicken farms, 10 duck farms and four goose farms.

The outbreaks are not expected to impact the supply of chicken meat during the Lunar New Year, as the virus has not spread to broilers and reserves in cold storage are enough to meet demand, Huang said.

Changhua and Yunlin counties have high concentrations of poultry farms, and the emergence of clusters there is concerning, but other affected regions are safe as there have been no reported cases in the two weeks since the initial outbreak, he said.

Farm operators should streamline work processes to reduce the frequency of round-ups, secure their facilities and ensure compliance with sanitation guidelines, he said.

Additional reporting by CNA

Investigation into the risk to human health of avian influenza (influenza A H5N1) in England: technical briefing 1 [CIDRAP, 21 Dec 2022]

The UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) is working with the Animal and Plant Health Agency (APHA) and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) to investigate the risk to human health of avian influenza (influenza A H5N1) in England. This briefing is produced to share data useful to other public health investigators and academic partners undertaking related work. It includes early evidence and preliminary analyses which may be subject to change.

Data reported in the technical briefing is as of 13 December 2022 (or as specified in the text) to allow time for analysis.

Levels of human health risk related to the outbreak of avian influenza in England
These risk levels were developed by the Technical Group to help to establish triggers for enhancing assessment and response. The avian influenza outbreak can be considered to fall into one of 6 potential levels of transmission.

Level 0 (Baseline)
Avian influenza circulating in birds within normal bounds of prevalence and with normal epidemiological dynamics.
Level 1
Avian influenza circulating in birds with altered epidemiological dynamics and/or increased prevalence.
Level 2
Level 1 plus detection of spillover into mammals.
Level 3
Evidence of viral genomic changes that provide an advantage for mammalian infection.
Level 4
Sustained transmission in non-human mammalian species or any human detection and mutations in haemagglutinin (HA) which allow transmission. (A single human detection in a person exposed to infected birds, without HA mutations, does not raise the risk level to 4.)
Level 5

Any human-to-human transmission.
The UK risk is currently assessed as at level 3.

Main data points
Since 1 October 2022, the start of the current reporting year for avian influenza, APHAhas notified UKHSA that highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) A(H5N1) has been confirmed in avian species at 130 premises in England. Wild bird testing is undertaken on a geographically representative sample of birds, with 447 influenza A (H5N1) detections at 280 locations in England reported since 1 October 2022. Since the introduction of the poultry housing order on 7 November 2022, numbers of infected premises are decreasing but detections in wild birds continue to suggest high levels of circulating virus in the UK.

From 1 October 2022 to 15 December 2022, health protection systems have recorded 2,085 human exposure episodes (where a person was directly exposed to an infected bird). There is likely to be substantial under ascertainment.

Detailed data on incidents (health protection responses to avian influenza detections) is incomplete. Based on the 29% of incidents for which there is data (1 October 2022 to 13 December 2022), personal protective equipment (PPE) was used in 27.3% of exposures, and antiviral prophylaxis in 15.9% of exposures. Symptoms were reported following 31 (4.3%) exposures, with 24 symptomatic swabs being carried out (77.4% of those eligible). There have been no detections of avian influenza viruses in humans the UK during the current reporting year (from 1 October 2022 to date) and there was one human detection in the UK in the preceding reporting year (1 October 2021 to 30 September 2022).

APHA report that 20 mammals have been retrospectively tested, of which 8 were influenza A (H5N1) positive. Four of these have genome sequences available and all show the presence of a mutation which is associated with potential advantages for mammalian infection. This is very limited data but, together with international data, is suggestive of sporadic mammalian spillover events.

Some clinical and regional public health laboratories undertake influenza subtyping and refer influenza A which is unsubtypable by standard clinical assays to UKHSA for characterisation.

From 1 January 2022 to 8 December 2022, 44 samples were referred to UKHSA as unsubtypable and of these 18 were seasonal H1 or H3 viruses, 11 had no virus detected, 6 had a low viral load precluding further characterisation, and 9 are still being characterised. Assessment of the sensitivity and completeness of this system for the detection of novel influenza viruses is being undertaken.

Part 1. Risk assessment as of 13 December 2022
This assessment is based on reports made from APHA and other partners to UKHSA. Data sharing is being established but UKHSA has not viewed the current data in full.

UK virus population
There is an increase in confirmed cases of influenza A infected birds (high confidence). In 2022, there has been year-round maintenance of influenza infection in indigenous wild birds which represents a change compared to the usual seasonal pattern in which infections die out over the summer. Compared to the previous risk assessment of 11 November 2022, there are a reducing number of infected premises following the introduction of the national housing order for farmed poultry, but still high levels of detections in dead wild birds.

Influenza A H5N1 is the predominant influenza virus subtype detected in wild birds and farmed flocks in the UK (high confidence). There is diversity within the UK population of H5N1 viruses with 11 genotypes detected since October 2021, including some reassortment with low pathogenic avian influenza viruses (LPAIVs). However, 7 of these genotypes have constituted a limited number of detections. The dominant circulating genotypes since October 2021 are AIV09 and AIV07-B2. Since October 2022, AIV09 is the predominant genotype. Another currently detected genotype in poultry is AIV48 which includes genes from gull-associated influenza viruses.

Genomic surveillance is proportionate for poultry outbreaks (a genome is generated for every affected premise). There is a limited genomic surveillance sampling in wild birds. APHA select birds to test and report that testing is distributed in time and space with host species consideration. There is very limited surveillance of mammals. Genomic data lags 7 to 10 days behind date of sample collection for poultry and currently longer for mammals.

Extent of human exposure in the UK
Owing to the disease burden in birds there is an increased interface between humans and infected birds (high confidence). In particular the high number of wild birds and domestic flocks with influenza A infection, especially where personal protective equipment is not worn, increases the likelihood of human exposures to this virus (moderate confidence).

Propensity to cause mammalian and human infection
Available surveillance data reported by APHA do not suggest widespread mammalian adaptation of this virus (low to moderate confidence).

Mutations known to be advantageous in mammalian infections are infrequent in the available genomic data from avian viruses however these data are lagging. APHA report that there is evidence of direct spill over from birds into some ‘scavenger’ wild mammalian species within the UK (and others noted outside the UK). In the UK 8 mammals, out of a total of 20 targeted from samples collected during 2021 to 2022 and retrospectively tested by APHA, were positive for influenza A (H5N1).

The species affected (foxes and otters) are presumed to have direct high-level exposure to infected birds based on feeding behaviour and food preferences. The 4 available influenza genomes from these positive mammals all show the PB2 E627K substitution. This mutation is known to be acquired rapidly after infection of a mammalian host in some influenza viruses and is associated with enhanced polymerase activity.

The rapid and consistent acquisition of the PB2 mutation in mammals may imply this virus has a propensity to cause zoonotic infections and further assessment should be made of the properties of this mutation. There is also recent confirmed transmission of a virus similar to the AIV48 genotype between mink in Spain, but the published genomes available show no evidence of significant HA mutation.

There is incomplete genotype to phenotype understanding and genomic data must be supplemented by in vitro and animal model studies.

There have been 4 instances of influenza A H5N1 2.3.4.4b detection in humans (1 UK, 1 USA, 2 Spain) between December 2021 and December 2022. There is limited asymptomatic testing of human contacts of bird cases in the UK and international surveillance is variable.

Nevertheless, by comparison with other zoonotic infections including influenza viruses, these data suggest that zoonotic infections are infrequent (low confidence).

Ability to cause (a) severe infection and (b) asymptomatic infection in humans There are no detected severe human cases associated with Influenza A H5N1 (clade 2.3.4.4b) in the UK or internationally. There is insufficient information to judge the risk of asymptomatic or mild disease due to limited testing in human contacts of infected birds.

Human-to-human transmission There is no evidence of sustained human to human transmission (moderate to high confidence). Subtyping surveillance in the NHS or through NHS referral to UKHSA is incomplete and could delay detection. There is insufficient information to assess the occurrence of limited human to human transmission such as transmission within households.

The current H5N1 2.3.4.4b viruses in UK birds react well against antisera raised against an available Influenza A(H5) World Health Organization (WHO) candidate vaccine virus (CVV) (A/Astrakhan/3212/2020), developed for pandemic preparedness and coordinated by WHO.

Assessment
The avian influenza outbreak in the UK is assessed as at risk level 3 although there is limited mammalian surveillance data. At present, there are no indicators of increasing risk to human health, however this is a low confidence assessment. The risk assessment is dynamic and requires regular review during this period of unusually high levels of transmission in birds with mammalian spillover. In vitro and animal model data are required. Enhancements to mammalian and human asymptomatic infection surveillance are both in preparation.

Part 2. Epidemiology update

2.1 Current epidemiological situation
There have been unprecedented levels of avian influenza circulating in England over 2021 and 2022. The dominant subtype currently circulating in avian species across England is highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) A(H5N1).

Since 1 October 2022, the start of the current 2022 to 2023 seasonal period, detections of avian influenza have been confirmed in both wild birds and infected premises which can include domestic flocks and poultry farms. APHA undertake diagnostic testing in any flocks where notifiable avian disease cannot be excluded by official veterinarians. The APHA also undertake passive surveillance of wild bird populations from the notification of mortality events by members of the public reported through a Defra helpline. Testing of avian influenza in wild birds is subject to dynamic surveillance policies and thresholds for collection based on resource implications and the current situation regarding infection trends across the UK.

Since the start of the 2022 to 2023 season, the APHA has notified UKHSA that HPAIA(H5N1) has been confirmed in avian species at 130 premises in England. Animal health surveillance has also detected A(H5N1) in 447 wild birds from 280 locations in England. One detection of A(H6N2) avian influenza was confirmed at an infected premises in the North West of England.
Detections of avian influenza at infected premises have continued through the reporting period and have fluctuated during this time (Figure 1). A national housing order for poultry was introduced on 7 November 2022. Wild bird detections have continued to demonstrate that the background risk from avian influenza in wild birds remains very high (Figure 1).

Detections of avian influenza have been concentrated in the East of England and the East Midlands, driven in particular by high numbers of infected premises in these areas (Figures 1 and 2). However, detections in wild birds have been more widespread across the country (Figure 1).
Figure 1. Confirmed detections of avian influenza in poultry and wild birds by setting in England from 1 October 2022 to 13 December 2022. Data provided by APHA

The data used in this graph can be found in the accompanying spreadsheet.

Figure 2. Choropleth map of avian influenza incidents detected in poultry and wild birds across England by upper tier local authority (UTLA), from 1 October 2022 to 13 December 2022

This map contains National Statistics data Crown copyright and database right 2022.
Data source: Animal and Plant Health Agency 2022.

Supplementary data is not available for this figure.

The APHA has undertaken retrospective testing of stored mammalian samples that were found either linked to infected premises or as having unusual clinical behaviours (for example, neurological signs), raising suspicion of infection with avian influenza. This has led to the identification of A(H5N1) infection in 8 out of 20 mammals collected since December 2021. Of these, 4 were from England and were detected in foxes, and 4 detections in Scotland, all of which were in otters.

2.2 Summary of exposed persons
The increase in detections of avian influenza has led to human exposures relating to farmed and wild birds, which are managed by UKHSA health protection teams (HPTs). Workers on farms can usually be easily identified, but the extent of human exposures to infected wild birds is more difficult to determine and there is likely to be substantial under ascertainment.

Public health guidance advises the use of personal protective equipment and antiviral prophylaxis for individuals at risk of exposure to avian influenza. Post-exposure, individuals are offered antiviral prophylaxis with a follow-up or health monitoring period of up to 10 days.

Symptomatic individuals are referred for swabbing to detect possible infection. There is also an option for asymptomatic swabbing for those eligible (individuals who did not wear PPE at the time of exposure but who remain symptom free during the follow-up period) as part of a surveillance pilot. However, the uptake from individuals for this pilot continues to be extremely low.

Details of exposed individuals are recorded on the HPZone case management system at UKHSA. HPZone was interrogated from 1 October 2022 to 15 December 2022. Data was selected for analysis where the infectious agent was ‘avian influenza’.

Over the reporting period, 2,085 exposure episodes were entered into the HPZone system. Exposed individuals were mainly identified as male (71.5%). Females accounted for 19.5% and gender was unknown for 9% of exposure episodes. Distribution of gender was similar across all age ranges (Figure 3). Age was unknown for 33.1% of exposure episodes entered into HPZone.

Figure 3. Age-sex distribution of exposure episodes captured in HPZone from 1 October 2022 to 15 December 2022

The data used in this graph can be found in the accompanying spreadsheet.

Following the epidemiology of avian influenza detections, the distribution of exposed individuals is concentrated in the East of England and the East Midlands (Figure 4).

Figure 4. Exposures reported on HPZone from 1 October 2022 to 15 December 2022

The data used in this graph can be found in the accompanying spreadsheet.

Information is also collected by HPTs using surveillance forms for each situation to document PPE use, antiviral use, symptom status, and any swabbing. These forms are returned to the national epidemiology team and linked to laboratory records held by UKHSA on respiratory testing.

Between 1 October 2022 and 13 December 2022, information was returned for 119 (29%) out of 411 incidents this season and recorded 716 exposure events. Individuals may be recorded in more than one event if they are exposed multiple times (exposure episodes are differentiated by time and location).

Data for other incidents is unavailable at present, however, in regions with high avian influenza activity, HPTs prioritise public health action over data collection and reporting.

The majority of surveillance forms received from HPTs relate to wild bird incidents (90 out of 119 forms returned) comprising 75.6% of data. Wild bird incidents often involve fewer exposed individuals.

Analysis of the available data indicates that PPE use was reported in 268 (37.4%) exposures.

Antiviral prophylaxis was reported for 114 (15.9%) exposures. Symptoms were reported following 31 (4.3%) exposures, with 24 symptomatic swabs being carried out (77.4% of those eligible). Thirteen asymptomatic swabs were performed and reported as part of an enhanced surveillance pilot from consenting individuals.

Data should be interpreted with caution due to the incomplete nature of information collected from exposed individuals. Data receipt is expected to lag to allow for adequate follow-up time of exposed persons to elapse.

There were no human detections of influenza H5 in England during the 2022 to 2023 season.
In December 2021, one human case of A(H5N1) was confirmed in England in an exposed person who remained asymptomatic throughout. However, this detection was in the context of close and prolonged exposure to infected poultry and contaminated material, without PPE. (Oliver and colleagues 2022)

In addition to the human case reported from England, 3 human cases of A(H5N1) of the same clade (A(H5N1) 2.3.4.4.b) were reported internationally by the WHO between December 2021 and December 2022. This includes one case from the USA and 2 cases from Spain. All 3 cases were involved in poultry decontamination and culling activities. The case from USA reported mild fatigue, and the 2 cases from Spain were asymptomatic. No human-to-human transmission has been reported.

UKHSA continues to carry out horizon scanning for epidemiological reports relevant to emerging influenza in humans and animals.

2.3 Capability to detect human cases of H5N1
Weekly national flu and COVID-19 reports are published by UKHSA. These include a detailed breakdown of influenza virus characterisation.

UKHSA receives influenza positive clinical samples referred from NHS and regional public health laboratories (PHLs) for whole genome sequencing, virus isolation and antigenic characterisation, year-round. This provides a picture of circulating influenza viruses in the community and in hospital settings. This system is designed to understand which viruses are causing seasonal influenza and is not calibrated to detect small numbers of novel influenza cases.

UKHSA request that samples detected as influenza A positive in NHS or UKHSA PHLswhich are not assigned a subtype through routine assays are forwarded to the UKHSARespiratory Virus Unit (RVU). The UKHSA RVU performs subtyping by polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and genome sequencing. The sensitivity of this system for detecting emerging viruses is currently under assessment.

Figure 5 shows the results for unsubtypable samples referred in 2022 up to 8 December 2022. As of 8 December 2022, 1.3% of samples (n=44) referred to UKHSAColindale from NHS or UKHSA PHLs in 2022 were influenza A unsubtypable. Of these, 41% (n=18) were characterised as seasonal H1 or H3 viruses, with 25% (n=11) having no virus detected and 14% (n=6) as having detectable but insufficient viral load to achieve a subtyping result.

Characterisation is ongoing for 9 samples.

Figure 5. Influenza A unsubtypable samples referred in 2022 up to 8 December 2022

The data used in this graph can be found in the accompanying spreadsheet.

Part 3. Genomic surveillance
The current genomic analysis is performed by APHA. UKHSA has requested full data access to undertake human health risk assessment in parallel.

APHA has published a pre-print describing the diversity of H5 avian influenza genomes in the UK between 2020 and 2022. The paper describes the genomic diversity sequences between October 2020 and May 2022, as well as the prevalence of some characterised mammalian adaptation mutations. Between October 2020 and October 2021, there were a range of H5Nx infections detected, with all highly pathogenic avian influenza virus (HPAIV) haemagglutinin (HA) sequences belonging to clade 2.3.4.4b. However, when typed by the HA segment, the majority of sequences between October 2021 and May 2022 were H5N1 (195 out of 196 sequences). One avian sequence in this dataset contained the mutation E627K in the polymerase (PB2) protein, which may confer advantages for mammalian infection.

From October 2021 to May 2022, no further avian sequences were found to contain the E627K substitution. In total across the whole period of genomic surveillance of the current influenza A (H5N1) outbreak, APHA report that they have assed 457 influenza genomes from birds for this mutation and detected it only once.

However, APHA have reported that all 4 H5N1 sequences obtained from mammals (foxes and otters) did possess this substitution.

Part 4. Planned rapid laboratory assessments and early data
4.1 Candidate vaccine viruses assessment
The development of influenza candidate vaccine viruses (CVVs), coordinated by WHO, remains an essential component of the overall global strategy for influenza pandemic preparedness.

This assessment was undertaken by the Worldwide Influenza Centre at the Francis Crick Institute as part of the existing UK commitment to supply data to the WHO global influenza programme and is based on haemagglutination inhibition assay data generated by UK and international laboratories in support of the programme.

The virus detected in the UK lies within the H5 clade 2.3.4.4b which is now widespread across Africa, Asia, Europe and North America. However, there is diversity within this clade and viruses from some countries, including in Eastern Europe, West Africa, Cambodia and Vietnam, are less well recognised by antiserum raised against the A/Astrakhan/3212/2020 2.3.4.4b CVV. As a result of this antigenic drift in some geographic areas, a recommendation was made in September to add a second 2.3.4.4b CVV recommendation (A/chicken/Ghana/AVL-76321VIR7050-39/2021-like). Recent antigenic analyses of H5 clade 2.3.4.4b viruses isolated from birds in the UK have all been genetically and antigenically similar to the original A/Astrakhan/3212/2020 CVV.

Although the recommended CVV is a good antigenic match for currently circulating viruses in the UK, partners within this expert technical group will continue to characterise emerging strains, both genetically and antigenically, within poultry and those that might be detected within humans.

4.2 Antivirals assessment
Three influenza specific treatments are approved by the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) in the UK. Two neuraminidase inhibitors (NAIs), oseltamivir and zanamivir, are already deployed, and one cap-dependent endonuclease inhibitor (baloxavir marboxil) is not yet marketed in the UK. Evidence suggests that all 3 drugs have activity against influenza A(H5N1).

UKHSA undertakes routine genomic surveillance for antiviral resistance in seasonal influenza viruses, using established databases of mutations associated with reduced drug susceptibility or reduced inhibition by NAIs including among avian influenza viruses, and will extend this to avian viruses routinely once data are made available.

Analysis performed by APHA on 316 full genome A(H5N1) HPAI virus sequences obtained from poultry and wild birds in the UK and Crown Dependencies from October 2021 to October 2022 did not identify any amino acid substitutions in NA associated with NAI reduced inhibition. A single viral sequence with an I38T amino acid substitution was identified. This substitution is known to reduce susceptibility to baloxavir in human seasonal A(H3N2) and A(H1N1)pdm09 viruses.

Phenotypic NAI susceptibility testing requires virus isolation and is performed as an enzyme inhibition assay at the Francis Crick Institute. Phenotypic testing for baloxavir susceptibility is being developed at the Crick Institute.

APHA, UKHSA and the WHO Collaborating Centre at the Francis Crick Institute will collaborate going forwards over avian influenza antiviral susceptibility surveillance.

Part 5. Further planned work
5.1 Preliminary knowledge gaps assessment
UKHSA is currently undertaking a research and evidence gaps analysis relating to the avian influenza outbreak in the UK with internal and external stakeholders. A group of experts were convened to discuss the emerging priority gaps for research, evaluation, and surveillance studies. Further workshops are planned to refine and prioritise these gaps and develop research questions. UKHSA will work with stakeholders, including academic partners and national research funders, to identify active research studies in these areas and develop and implement studies to address remaining gaps.

5.2 Surveillance
Mammalian surveillance
APHA are developing a surveillance pipeline for submission and testing of mammalian samples. Carcasses may be submitted where animals are:
?found dead in areas located near to defined infected premises, or
?are displaying clinical signs that may be considered indicative of potential infection with HPAIV

These surveillance activities are primarily driven through the Diseases of Wildlife Scheme.

Enhancement of asymptomatic surveillance in humans
UKHSA is developing protocols for intensive sampling of individuals working on sentinel infected premises. These can be used to establish human asymptomatic infection parameters at baseline and in response to changes in viral or epidemiological features of the outbreak.

5.3 Improvements to data and analysis
The following areas have been identified for improvements to surveillance, data and analytics:
1. UKHSA should receive full genomic sequencing data in real time from APHA and undertake continuous human health focused genomic risk assessment.

2. Current influenza surveillance systems, which are primarily tailored towards monitoring seasonal influenza, should be assessed for sensitivity and timeliness in detecting emerging influenza viruses.

3. A more detailed assessment is needed of the wild bird sampling framework and consideration should be given to:
?　reporting more detailed metrics including positivity rate, species and numbers of reported but untested birds
?　assessing whether more detailed sampling studies could improve understanding of the viral population and transmission in the UK

Sources and acknowledgments
Data sources
Data relating to animal health surveillance and investigations taking place across England obtained from the APHA. This includes data from wild bird surveillance, notifiable disease reports at infected premises and detections in mammals.
Surveillance forms are completed by UKHSA HPTs for each confirmed setting (includes both poultry and wild bird settings). This includes the follow-up of exposed persons and details of exposure. Data is enhanced with laboratory records for respiratory testing held by UKHSA.
Details of exposed individuals are also collected from HPZone, the UKHSA case management system.
International surveillance data of human cases of avian influenza is reported by the WHO under the International Health Regulations and routinely collated by UKHSA.

Authors of this report
Rachel Abbey, Carolina Arevalo, Ashley Banyard, Wendy Barclay, Ian Brown, Alexander Byrne, Fernando Capelastegui, Lorenzo Cattarino, Meera Chand, David Edwards, Eileen Gallagher, Irene Gonsalvez, Katja Hoschler, Susan Hopkins, Munir Iqbal, Joe James, Angie Lackenby, Nicola Lewis, Thomas Peacock, Richard Puleston, Jess Tarrant, Nick Watkins, Maria Zambon, Anissa Lakhani.

Contributors
? UKHSA Data Science and Geospatial team
? UKHSA Genomics Public Health Analysis
? UKHSA Respiratory Virus Unit
? UKHSA Research and Evaluation
? UKHSA Research Support and Governance Office
? UKHSA Rapid Investigation Team
? Animal and Plant Health Agency
? Imperial College London
? Francis Crick Institute
? The Pirbright Institute

Avian Influenza Technical Group
The Avian Influenza Technical Group includes members with expertise in clinical infectious diseases, clinical research, epidemiology, genomics and virology:
? Meera Chand (Chair), UKHSA
? Wendy Barclay, Imperial College London
? Alexander Byrne, APHA
? Ashley Banyard, APHA
? Ian Brown, APHA
? Neil Ferguson, Imperial College London
? Yper Hall, UKHSA
? Bassam Hallis, UKHSA
? Susan Hopkins, UKHSA
? Katja Hoschler, UKHSA
? Munir Iqbal, The Pirbright Institute
? Joe James, APHA
? Angie Lackenby, UKHSA
? Nicola Lewis, Francis Crick Institute
? Nicholas Loman, UKHSA and University of Birmingham
? Berit Mueller-Pebody, UKHSA
? Derren Ready, UKHSA
? Thomas Peacock, Imperial College London
? Richard Puleston, UKHSA
? Andrew Rambaut, University of Edinburgh
? Nick Watkins, UKHSA
? Maria Zambon, UKHSA
? Esther Robinson, UKHSA

Europe plagued by 'most devastating' bird flu outbreak ever, EU says [FRANCE 24 English, 21 Dec 2022]

Europe has been gripped by its "most devastating" ever outbreak of bird flu in the past year, European health authorities said on Tuesday as experts study the feasibility of vaccinations.

Between October 2021 and September 2022, around 2,500 outbreaks of bird flu were detected on farms in 37 European countries, the European Food Safety Authority, the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control and the EU said.

In that time "some 50 million birds were slaughtered" on affected farms, the EFSA reported.
The toll did not include preventive culls of chickens, ducks and turkeys that were carried out alongside the outbreaks, the health agency told AFP.

The EFSA said that "for the first time" there had been no marked separation between two epidemic waves, as the virus was not brought under control in the summer.

This autumn, the epidemic was more virulent than last year at the same time, with the number of infected farms 35 percent higher.

Between September 2 and December 10, 2022, around 400 outbreaks were recorded on farms in 18 European countries. The virus has also been detected more than 600 times in wild birds, notably ducks and swans, which the report said may have contributed to the spread of the virus between farms.

Health authorities are studying the possibility of using vaccinations to arrest the spread of the virus.

The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control said the risk of infection in humans was low, and "low to medium" for people working in contact with birds and poultry.

New Coronavirus News from 21 Jan 2023

Lunar New Year dilemma for China’s post ‘zero-COVID’ travellers [Al Jazeera English, 21 Jan 2023]

By Frederik Kelter

Despite removal of COVID travel restrictions, many have still grappled with the decision of whether to visit vulnerable loved ones.

Chen Ling could barely contain her excitement as the bullet train from Beijing rolled into Zhengzhou East railway station in central China’s Henan province.

It was an afternoon, just a few days before the beginning of this week’s Lunar New Year festivities, and the train was crowded but Chen Ling could not have cared less.

The 29-year-old was happy to be one of the many millions of people travelling across China to visit family for one of the most celebrated festivals in China’s calendar.

Chen Ling had not visited her parents and hometown located outside Zhengzhou since 2019 – before China’s draconian “zero-COVID” policy had prevented people from travelling.

“I was only thinking about seeing my family again,” she told Al Jazeera in an interview via the Chinese social media platform WeChat.

“I couldn’t keep back my tears when I saw them,” Chen Ling said. “Neither could my mom when I hugged her for the first time in over three years,” she said, recounting how she hurried off the train and beat a path across the teeming station to find her parents waiting outside the main entrance.

With the recent and rapid dismantling of the deeply-unpopular zero-COVID policy, families across China are reuniting for the first time in years to celebrate the Lunar New Year holidays.

Many, such as Chen Ling, are ecstatic. She said that if she had been told just a few months ago she would be reunited with her family for the holiday, she would not have believed it.

But many are also afraid that Lunar New Year holiday travel – described as the world’s largest annual migration of humans – will result in vulnerable family members being exposed to the spread of COVID-19 in remote hometowns.

After three Lunar New Year holidays – from 2020 to 2022 – when travel restrictions, as well as quarantine and testing requirements, kept so many Chinese families apart, some are grappling with a difficult decision: Should they continue to keep their distance from vulnerable loved ones during this year’s holiday?

It’s a dilemma with no simple answer.

‘I miss them and really want to go home’

Zhang Jie, 35, is among the many Chinese people who feel that reuniting with family is not so simple.

“Even though it is possible now, I will not visit my family for Lunar New Year,” Zhang Jie told Al Jazeera from Shanghai.

Zhang Jie’s parents and grandparents live in the same household in his hometown, which is a small village not far from Wuhan. He is afraid he might unknowingly bring the coronavirus with him if he joins the crowds heading back home for the festivities.

“None of them have had COVID and my grandparents are old and unvaccinated so, even though I miss them and really want to go home, I decided not to risk it,” he told Al Jazeera.

Instead, he will stay in Shanghai and celebrate the New Year with some friends who, like him, are forgoing family visits out of fear for the lives of their elderly relatives if they were to travel to visit them now.

China’s President Xi Jinping expressed a similar sentiment in a speech on Thursday.

“I am worried most about the rural areas and farmers,” Xi said.

“Medical facilities are relatively weak in rural areas, thus prevention is difficult and the task is arduous,” he said, emphasising that ensuring the health and safety of the elderly had to now be prioritised.

There have been countless stories in Chinese state media of medical resources being diverted towards rural hospitals and clinics preparing for a surge in infections in small towns and the countryside.

Yet, China’s strictly-controlled state media has also reported that the COVID-19 wave the country is now experiencing may have peaked, after striking cities such as Beijing, Guangzhou and Shanghai immediately after restrictions began to be lifted in early December. China’s National Health Commission also recently revealed that some 60,000 people had died from the virus since early December, though the commission believed that the “emergency peak” of the latest surge appeared to have passed, according to media reports.

Others have a more stark assessment of the situation. According to a recently updated analysis by the London-based health research firm Airfinity, China could see approximately 36,000 deaths a day during the Lunar New Year, with travellers being the leading catalyst in spreading the virus westward.

Stay or go?
Given the many years they had already spent separated, several people told Al Jazeera they were willing to take the risk and visit family members over the Lunar New Year period.

They had their own COVID risk-mitigation strategies, which involved minimising contacts and undergoing a mini, self-imposed quarantine in the lead-up to their departure day.

They also said they tried to take the most direct route possible to their destinations to avoid contact with others and, where possible, avoiding public transportation altogether by travelling in private vehicles.

But some were still conflicted about what to do this weekend.

Liu Hong, 28, was very unsure whether to stay in Guangzhou where she is based or travel to visit her family in Lanzhou in north-central China to celebrate the new year.

“I don’t want to spread COVID, least of all to my family members, but I also really miss my parents and my grandparents after three years of separation,” Liu Hong told Al Jazeera.
“It’s not just that I miss my family,” she explained.

“My grandfather is sick with cancer and doesn’t have much time left so if I don’t go see him now in Lanzhou, I might never get the chance,” she said.

Unable to make such a momentous decision, Liu Hong said that she had told her grandmother and grandfather – the two most COVID-vulnerable members of her family – of her dilemma and asked them to decide.

Liu Hong’s grandparents gave her a speedy and very definite answer.

“They told me that I was being ridiculous and that of course I should come home.”

New Coronavirus News from 16 Jan 2023

China braces for Covid surge as lunar new year travel rush begins [ABC News, 16 Jan 2023]

Luggage-laden passengers flocked to railway stations and airports in China’s megacities on Monday, heading home for holidays that health experts fear could intensify a Covid-19 outbreak that has claimed thousands of lives.

After three years of strict and suffocating anti-virus controls, China in early December abruptly abandoned its zero-Covid policy, letting the virus run freely through its population of 1.4 billion.

Authorities on Saturday said nearly 60,000 people with Covid had died in hospitals between 8 December and 12 January, a huge increase from previous figures that had been criticised by the World Health Organization for not reflecting the scale and severity of the outbreak.

Even those numbers most likely excluded many people dying at home, especially in rural areas with weaker medical systems, one health expert has said. Several experts forecast more than 1 million people in China will die from the disease this year.

Ahead of the lunar new year holidays, also known as the spring festival, which officially starts on 21 January, state media has been filled with stories of rural hospitals and clinics bolstering their supplies of drugs and equipment.

“The peak of Covid infection in our village has passed, but the spring festival is approaching and there are still left-behind villagers, especially elderly people, at risk of secondary infection,” a doctor in Shaanxi province said in an article by regional news outlet Red Star News.

“If the anti-viral and other drugs were more abundant, I would be more confident.”

As well as fever drugs and oxygen supplies, China’s National Health Commission has said it would equip every village clinic with pulse oximeters, fingertip devices commonly used during the pandemic to quickly check oxygen levels.

Beijing’s main rail station has been packed with passengers leaving the capital in recent days, according to witnesses.

In China’s most populous city, Shanghai, temporary night trains have been added to meet demand for travellers heading to the eastern Anhui province, China’s official state news agency Xinhua reported.

Meanwhile, daily arrivals in the gambling hub of Macau exceeded 55,000 on Saturday, the highest daily arrivals since the pandemic began.

In Hong Kong, the government has said it would increase the number of people who can pass through designated land-border control points to the mainland to 65,000 people a day from 50,000 between 18 January and 21 January.

China’s transport ministry has said it expects more than 2bn trips in the weeks around the holidays.

The revival of travel in China has lifted expectations of a rebound in the world’s second-largest economy, which is suffering its lowest growth rates in nearly half a century.

Those hopes helped lift Asian equity markets on Monday, adding to gains of 4.2% last week.

China’s blue-chip index was up 0.6% on Monday, while global oil prices have also been supported on expectations of a recovery in demand from China, the world’s top importer.

Chinese data on economic growth, retail sales and industrial output due out this week are certain to be dismal, but markets will probably look past that to how China’s reopening could bolster global growth, analysts say.

New Coronavirus News from 19 Jan 2023

Rural China's subsiding COVID-19 wave suggests virus spread before reopening [CNA, 19 Jan 2023]

MAYIDUI, China: COVID-19 swept swiftly through southern China's rural mountain villages last month, and the wave appears to have subsided - supporting expert theories that the country's most recent outbreak preceded the lifting of restrictions.

China abruptly abandoned its zero-COVID policy in early December, and the explosion in cases that packed hospitals and crematoriums was widely attributed to the sudden reopening.

But in over a dozen communities visited by AFP in Yunnan province and other parts of rural China this month, the surge appears to have peaked weeks earlier than predicted.

On Yunnan's Jingmai mountain, where a handful of mostly Blang ethnic minority hamlets perch on slopes next to tea fields, doctor Zhong Qingfang pinpointed the height of infections to around Dec 20.

"There is basically no one who hasn't been infected," she said, adding that she had to work while ill herself.

Last Wednesday, it was clear cases had ebbed as just three elderly patients sat at the entrance to Zhong's clinic, hooked up to IV drips.

Health centres visited by AFP in east China's Shandong and Anhui earlier this month also appeared less busy compared to the villagers' descriptions of what had happened just weeks before.

The fact that the virus has already passed through even small rural communities suggests "the tail end of the current wave in China", said Paul Tambyah, president of the Asia Pacific Society of Clinical Microbiology and Infection.

"There is good evidence that cases were beginning to rise in late November," he said.
The World Health Organization has said it believes the current outbreak "started long before any easing of the zero-COVID policy".

Tambyah said that the uptick in infections was in fact the "most likely explanation for the abandonment of the zero-COVID policy in early December".

EMPTY CLINICS
At a hospital in Yunnan's Mayidui Township, signs directed visitors toward a specially constructed fever clinic, while a bright red placard marked the "COVID-positive zone".

But on a sunny afternoon last week, no COVID-19 patients were in sight in the largely empty facility.

Tan, a Chinese medicine practitioner, told AFP she and her colleagues had received up to 80 COVID-19 patients each day during the peak of infections shortly after Jan 1.

In another village, the sole medical practitioner Luo Yongping told AFP that "around half" of the residents had already been infected.

"The peak was one week ago," he said, adding that demand for medicine to treat COVID-19 symptoms had quickly depleted the village's supply.

Most people AFP spoke to said they had been vaccinated.

But Xi Chen, a health policy expert from the Yale School of Public Health, said that in China's rural areas, the efficacy of the jabs was "fast eroded" because the last doses were administered a year ago.

The "unprecedentedly swift COVID spread" points to low levels of immunity among the population, he said.

In contrast to locals AFP spoke to in the country's east in early January, most people interviewed in Yunnan said they didn't know of any deaths in the wave that just passed.

Zhong knew of only one elderly patient who had succumbed.

Central authorities reported almost 60,000 COVID-19 deaths across the country between Dec 8 and Jan 12, though the true toll is likely higher as the figures only include deaths in hospitals.

SECOND WAVE COMING
Chinese leader Xi Jinping said Wednesday he is "concerned" about the virus situation as people head to their rural hometowns ahead of Lunar New Year celebrations.

With hundreds of millions expected to travel, medical staff are on alert for a potential second wave.

Tan from the Mayidui hospital told AFP that its staff had prepared kits for the surrounding villages with antigen tests and medicines.

But in areas AFP visited, few wore facemasks and many downplayed the threat of the virus.

Smoking a cigarette through a metal water pipe, Zhang, a village store owner on Jingmai mountain, dismissed COVID-19 as similar to the flu.

"We would've caught colds anyway in the winter," he said.

"Lots and lots of people got infected," said a woman running a roadside stall in Xinghuoshan village, one of many selling homemade red wine.

"It's not that serious."

China braces for another COVID wave, as first Lunar New Year without restrictions approaches [ABC News, 19 Jan 2023]

By Karson Yiu

Chinese officials said 60,000 people have died since zero-COVID was lifted.

HONG KONG and BEIJING -- With just days to go until the Lunar New Year, throngs of bundled-up travelers shuffle their way through the freezing temperatures towards Beijing Railway Station, the distinctive mishmash of eastern and western styles built in the 1950s to triumphantly herald Mao's "New China."

"We wish Beijing Railway Station all the best for the Year of Rabbit!" shouts a group of youthful security guards, grinning while hoisting up red new year's scrolls. Their crouching colleague preserving it on his phone for social media.

There is almost a sense of normalcy until a lone traveler in a full head-to-toe white hazmat suit, one that had become so ubiquitous in China's age of covid, scurries past, rattling the wheels of his suitcase on the plaza tiles.

They are all rushing towards long-awaited reunions.

This is the first Lunar New Year holiday, also known as the Spring Festival in China, after Beijing dropped nearly all of its zero-COVID measures and the first in over three years without any COVID-related travel restrictions. Chinese officials expect nearly 2.1 billion passenger trips to made during the 40-day travel period around the holiday, normally regarded as the largest annual human migration in the world, doubling the trips made just a year ago when Beijing dissuaded travel to prevent the spread of the coronavirus.

Amongst the crowds is a Beijing-based office worker in her early thirties surnamed Liu, who is going back home to the northeastern city of Harbin for first time since the pandemic.

China's massive wave of infections after its abandonment of zero-COVID measures appears to be ebbing just as the celebrations and reunions this coming weekend threatens to reignite a new wave.

Liu, however, is not worried. She had recovered recently from the coronavirus and her entire family and her friends back in Harbin have already been through a bout with Covid as well.

The true size and scale of China's "Exit Wave" from nearly three years of restrictions remains unclear, as authorities abandoned the once-ubiquitous mass testing regime almost overnight. Anecdotally, infections seemed to have affected everyone, everywhere all at once.

Scenes of long lines outside Beijing crematoriums and bodies having to be placed on the floor of hospital morgues because of full freezers, repeated themselves in major cities across the country in videos circulated on social media, undercutting China's official toll of 37 COVID-related deaths for much of December.

Space technology firm Maxar released satellite images of increased traffic outside funeral homes across China. One image of a funeral home in eastern city of Huzhou showed a significantly packed parking lot compared to images from a year earlier. When reached by ABC News, a worker there was dismissive, saying the situation "was not the same as been reported by media" before promptly hanging up.

A study released by Peking University's National School of Development last week estimated that up to 900 million or some 64% of the entire population had been affected by COVID-19 by Jan. 11. The study used data extrapolated from online search queries across the country because of the lack of official figures. Articles referencing the study were promptly censored.

In the following days, after weeks of calls for transparency domestically and internationally over China's official numbers, including from World Health Organization, Chinese health officials finally announced that there were nearly 60,000 COVID-19 related deaths at government health facilities in the period since restrictions were relaxed. The majority of deaths were seniors over 65 with underlying diseases, officials said. China had only recorded 5,273 official deaths during most of the pandemic.

Jiao Yahui, director of medical affairs at China's National Health Commission said, "The number of fever clinic visitors is generally on a downward trend after peaking, both in cities and rural areas."

According to officials, emergency patients nationwide peaked at 1.526 million on Jan. 2 and then continued to decline. By Jan. 12, they were down 28.4% from the peak.

At two packed hospitals in Central Beijing visited by ABC News during the height of the wave in December were now relatively quiet this week. The inundated fever clinics at Chaoyang Hospital from mid-December now only had less than a handful of waiting patients. At the China-Japan Friendship Hospital, patient lining up at the respiratory medicine clinic had visibly halved. The constant stream of ambulances to the hospital was noticeably absent and the non-emergency medicine clinics of the hospital were bustling again.

Beijing's Dongjiao crematorium told ABC News that they were still operating around the clock but demand was less than what they were seeing in December when hearses lined for hours outside.

In the southwestern metropolis of Chongqing, a suburban funeral cerement store in the Shapingba district told ABC News their business was back to normal. They saw a spike in sales beginning on Dec. 5, even before the zero-COVID U-turn on Dec. 7. They reached their peak sales just few days later on Dec. 10, meaning the virus was likely spreading widely weeks before authorities abandoned their harsh COVID restrictions. At their peak, the store was selling 20 sets of burial garments a day when they would normally only sell four sets.

ABC News reached a family in Chongqing that lost a relative in recent days. They said that the demand at funeral homes appears to have eased and they were able to secure a memorial hall without waiting, though prices remained elevated.

The abrupt shift away from the government's signature zero-COVID strategy which was trumpeted as late as October by Chinese President Xi Jinping as an "all-out people's war" that "protected the people's health and safety" surprised many around the world and within China.

On Tuesday, figures released China's National Bureau of Statistics, showed that China's economy was buckling under the zero-COVID restrictions, missing Beijing's target of 5.5% annual growth, collapsing to only 3% from 8.4% in 2021, the slowest since the 1970s apart from the first year of the pandemic.

"Data still confirms a depressing end to a challenging year for the Chinese economy," said Aidan Yao, Senior Economist at AXA Investment Managers.

Yao, however, believes the Chinese economy bottomed out in December and figures even reflected the beginning of a recovery in the later part of the month as the COVID wave moved past its peak.

"December has likely marked the darkest before the dawn for the Chinese economy. As COVID comes and goes at an extremely fast speed, normalcy is being restored in cities that have passed the peak of infections," said Yao. "Given the current run rate, it is likely that the majority of the country would pass the peak wave by late-January or early-February, paving the way for a sustained and broad-based recovery thereafter."

However, Yao warned, "the spread of the virus in rural China is of a particular concern, given the limited medical infrastructure in many in-land provinces."

"If migrant workers cannot return to cities on time after the Lunar New Year as they have to look after the sick" it would present an added challenge for the economy.

Back outside the Beijing Railway Station, a 26-year old migrant construction worker surnamed Wang is making his way slowly to back home to the city of Yinchuan in the northwestern Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region. It's also his first trip home in three years.

Forced to transit in Beijing because all direct trains from Shanghai, where he works, were sold out because of this year's demand, Wang admits he's a little apprehensive of a new wave hitting his hometown. He remains one of the few he knows who still hasn't been infected.

New Coronavirus News from 20 Jan 2023

China announces lunar new year censorship crackdown to silence Covid ‘rumours’ [The Guardian, 20 Jan 2023]

Plan to target ‘gloomy sentiments’ across festival period comes as independent health forecasters estimate over 600,000 deaths from Covid

Chinese cyber authorities have announced an internet censorship crackdown to ensure there are no “gloomy sentiments” caused by pandemic “rumours” during the lunar new year festival.

It comes as health forecasting firm Airfinity estimated more than 600,000 people have likely died since zero-Covid restrictions were lifted in December – 10 times more than Chinese authorities have officially declared.

The month-long “Spring Festival online improvement” program will target those spreading what authorities deem to be “rumours” about the spread of Covid and patient experiences.

The national cyber administration specified “in-depth rectification of false information and other issues to prevent gloomy sentiments”.

It specifically cited the investigation and punishment of “online rumours related to the epidemic” and “fabricating patient experiences”, as well as producing or sharing fake virus treatments. The announcement said the work would “prevent misleading the public and causing social panic”.

Online, social media has been awash with personal stories of people contracting Covid, struggling to source medication or healthcare, and losing elderly relatives to the disease. The personal experiences of many jarred with the official narrative that the outbreak was under control and the response “science led”, prompting unusual levels of online criticism against the government.

On Saturday health officials announced an updated death toll of almost 60,000 people. The figure included only those who had died in hospital. Previously, the government had only reported about 5,000 Covid deaths since the pandemic began, including just a few dozen since the zero Covid policy was abandoned in early December. It was at odds with widespread reports of fatalities, with some major cities reporting infection rates of up to 90% of their populations.

The ruling Communist party government is hypersensitive to foreign criticism of its Covid response and accusations that it is not being transparent with data. Early warnings about the outbreak by Chinese doctor Li Wenliang were initially dismissed and punished as rumour. More recent reporting on the mass outbreak following the lifting of restrictions was branded a “China-bashing carnival” in state media.

Health officials have claimed the current wave of infections has peaked, but it followed warnings of further infections spread across lunar new year as hundreds of millions of people travel across the country. People were urged not to visit elderly relatives unless necessary.

On Thursday, independent forecaster Airfinity said their new modelling had raised estimates of case numbers and fatalities in China. It said the number of deaths since December was now estimated at 608,000, up from the previous estimate of 437,000.

The organisation also changed its forecast of two successive infection waves to one, which was “larger and more severe”, bringing as many as 62m new cases over the 14-day holiday period.

“Deaths are forecast to peak at 36,000 a day on the 26th of January during the Lunar New Year Festival. This is up from our previous estimate of deaths peaking at 25,000 a day,” it said.

“The implication of one larger wave as opposed to two smaller ones is increased pressure on hospitals and crematoriums and therefore also potentially a higher case fatality ratio.”

China’s censors have appeared to struggle to control critical social media commentary in the wake of the zero Covid policy reversal. The new program shows a renewed effort to stamp out dissent, and ensure China’s online environment reflects the Party’s image and ideals.

“After all this, they will say you have to be happy, it will be politically incorrect if you are not happy,” said one Chinese Twitter user in response.

“It seems that the best way to solve the problem is to ‘cover your mouth’.” said another. “I can’t say anything but praise.”

The Spring festival program also continues an ongoing crackdown on excessive fan culture and illegal gambling, and targets online glorification of excessive consumption and wealth.

As examples, it cited people deliberately showing off their “luxury life” with excessive dinners, year-end bonuses, large red envelopes of cash (a traditional New Years gift) and expensive gifts.

The administration said it would also “investigate and deal with the deliberate displaying of images of overeating and drinking during the Spring Festival, and promoting extravagant and wasteful information.”

COVID casts shadow over Lunar New Year celebrations in China [PBS NewsHour, 20 Jan 2023]

Medical experts predict China could see tens of thousands of deaths a day over the Lunar New Year holiday. Since the dismantling of the government’s zero-COVID policy, many have been anxious about the wave of infections that have swept through. As special correspondent Richard Kimber reports, most are brushing risks and fears aside to celebrate the most important festival on the Chinese calendar.

Read the Full Transcript
• Geoff Bennett:
Since the abrupt dismantling of the Chinese government's zero COVID policy, many people have been anxious about China opening up to the rest of the world and the wave of infections that have swept through the country.

But, as special correspondent Richard Kimber reports, most are brushing risks and fears aside to celebrate the most important festival on the Chinese calendar, the lunar new year.
• Richard Kimber:
It's just days to go before the start of the Spring Festival. In Beijing, the holiday rush has already begun.

This is the first time mass travel without COVID restrictions has been allowed in nearly three years. For many of the capital's migrant workers who come to make a better living for their families, it's an emotional return home to be with their loved ones.

Qin Ziguang from Changchun in Northeastern China hasn't been back in five years.
•　Qin Ziguang, Migrant Worker (through translator):
Finally, I'm going back home. Before, I was quite busy in Beijing, and, in the past few years, I couldn't go back because of the epidemic.
•　Richard Kimber:
China's Ministry of Transport says it expects travel to double compared to a year ago to more than two billion trips over the holiday period. It would mark a recovery to 70 percent of pre-pandemic levels.

Scenes at the railway station are in stark contrast with how it looked before China abandoned its strict zero COVID approach, following widespread anger over pandemic curbs. Gone are the security personnel dressed in hazmat suits that patrolled transport hubs. And Q.R. health code checkpoints where people have to verify their health status before entering are nowhere to be seen either.
•　Qin Ziguang (through translator):
Of course, it's now more convenient. It's easy coming in and out. I can go wherever I want.
•　Richard Kimber:
But now the virus has been let loose, some aren't taking chances.

One man we spoke to called Hua said, even though he's returning home, he won't be visiting friends or relatives.
•　Hua, Property Manager (through translator):
The epidemic hasn't ended. I wear this to protect myself, as well as others.
• Richard Kimber:
London-based health analytics firm Airfinity forecasts that China could see as many as 36,000 deaths a day over the Spring Festival holidays.

Over the past two months, COVID-19 has ripped through the country, crowding out hospitals and filling crematoriums like this one. Officially, about 60,000 people have died of COVID-19 since early December. That's according to China's National Health Commission. Medical experts say the true figure could be 10 times that. But it's hard to say exactly where the death toll stands.

The World Health Organization has accused China of underestimating the severity of its outbreak. Earlier this month, it also said a lack of data from the country was making it difficult to help manage the risks.

Mike Ryan is executive director of the WHO.
•　Dr. Mike Ryan, Executive Director, World Health Organization:
We do want and are working ever closer with our colleagues in China to try and understand better the transmission dynamics. But we still do not have adequate information to make a full comprehensive risk assessment. And, therefore, we will continue to try to encourage access to that data.
•　Richard Kimber:
Medical experts have also warned that the rapid spread of the virus now might make the emergence of mutations more likely.

Several countries, including the U.S., have imposed travel restrictions on arrivals from China.

But, at the same time, many other places are welcoming the return of Chinese tourists, among them, Hong Kong. It's a special administrative region of China. Even it had been largely cut off from the mainland until borders fully reopened this month.

The high-speed rail line behind me that connects the Chinese mainland to Hong Kong has been closed throughout the pandemic. Now its reopening is expected to see a surge in the number of Chinese tourists coming across the border. And just to give you an idea of how important that is for the Hong Kong economy, before the COVID-19 pandemic, more than two-thirds of the 56 million arrivals into Hong Kong from overseas came from across the border.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic began, the city has fallen into a deep recession. Many people are praying a rebound in retail and tourism will help lift the economy. But economists remain pessimistic and say a meaningful recovery could take much longer.

Its fate is tied closely to the mainland's uncertain outlook. China's surveyed unemployment rate for December likely stood above the government's targeted ceiling of 5.5 percent.

Dan Wang is chief economist with Hang Seng Bank.
•　Dan Wang, Chief Economist, Hang Seng Bank:
With this kind of high unemployment rate, people's expectation for future growth prospect is quite low. And, with that, that means, even if we see some of the rebound for the tourist sites and big cities, the general recovery will not really be there. We really have to wait until 2024 before we see the general recovery.
•　Richard Kimber:
But, as the country marks its first Spring Festival free from COVID restrictions, many people are simply celebrating the moment and hoping to put the past few tough years behind them.

Covid Catastrophe Looms for China's New Year Travelers [Bloomberg, 20 Jan 2023]

• Sparse health care, elderly residents put rural China at risk
• World’s largest outbreak to spread across China during holiday

The sudden dismantling of China’s Covid Zero restrictions in December means hundreds of millions of people are headed home for the Lunar New Year holiday for the first time since 2019. The crush of travel risks supercharging the world’s biggest Covid outbreak, spreading it to every corner of the country.

Travelers, from migrant workers to college students to educated urban elites, risk carrying the highly-infectious omicron strain with them to Covid-naive swathes of rural China that have managed to evade the pandemic - until now.

Known as the world’s biggest human migration, the holiday traditionally involves packed planes, trains, buses and ferries departing big cities along China’s prosperous eastern coast for remote hinterlands as workers reunite with their families ahead of the new lunar year, which begins on Sunday. This year, they may be bringing Covid-19 with them, and exposing their loved ones to it for the first time.

Some 2.1 billion trips are expected to take place during the 40-day Spring Festival period, double the number of treks from last year.

“There is a lot of jubilation around going home to celebrate the Chinese New Year, but that could also bring about tragedy for a lot of families,” said Zuo-Feng Zhang, chair of the department of epidemiology at the Fielding School of Public Health at University of California, Los Angeles.

Chinese President Xi Jinping singled out Covid’s rural spread in a nationwide video address he held before the holiday, saying he’s especially concerned about efforts to battle Covid in the countryside. Health experts are worried the virus could ravage the vulnerable in villages with sparse health care infrastructure, creating worse outcomes than the outbreaks that have already strained hospitals, overwhelmed crematoriums and crippled the nation’s megacities.

Rural China is particularly susceptible to harm from Covid, Zhang said. Nearly one in four residents are aged 60 or older, compared to 19% of the total population, a group that’s comparatively less vaccinated and more likely to develop complications. Many people are unfamiliar with the virus, with no exposure or natural immunity to the infection.

Meanwhile, medical resources in remote areas are scarce. There are only 1.62 doctors and nurses combined for every 1,000 people in rural China, compared to 2.9 doctors and 3.3 nurses nationally. Access to intensive care with experienced doctors and equipment like ventilators to help gravely ill patients survive is often miles away.

Megacities Hit
The predicative health analytics firm Airfinity Ltd. raised its estimate for China’s coming Covid deaths to peak at 36,000 a day, an increase of 11,000 every 24 hours from a previous forecast, after taking into account travel for the upcoming holiday. The London-based pandemic-tracking firm initially anticipated two Covid surges, one before and one after the Chinese New Year celebration. Now it says unfettered New Year travel will likely merge them into one massive wave.

The result is likely “a significant burden on China’s healthcare system for the next fortnight,” said Airfinity’s analytic director Matt Linley. “Many treatable patients could die due to overcrowded hospitals and lack of care.”

The virus has quickly raced through China’s megacities and highly settled regions. Henan, one of the country’s most populous provinces, said nearly 90% of its residents have been infected. Top-tier cities, from the nation’s capital Beijing and financial center Shanghai to the southern trade hub Guangzhou, have all said their outbreaks have peaked.

The sudden avalanche of disease, with some researchers projecting that more than than 900 million of the country’s 1.4 billion people have been infected, led to persistent shortages of everything from basic drugs to reduce fever to potent antivirals like Pfizer Inc.’s Paxlovid.

Covid Rips Through Rural China Ahead of Lunar New Year Migration
The true toll of the outbreak in rural areas may be hard to decipher. Government censors, concerned that overwhelmed villages and death reports from the heartland could undermine New Year celebrations, are getting more active.

The Cyberspace Administration of China, the country’s internet watchdog, recently vowed to double down on what it called Covid-related rumors ranging from fabricating estimates of the virus’s spread to experiences of getting sick that may mislead the public and cause public panic.

Health authorities, meanwhile, issued a slew of directives urging local governments to improve hospital preparation and help them work with rural clinics to handle patients with severe infections. The agriculture ministry is sending one oxygen concentrator and two pulse oximeters to village clinics across the country.

Covid Wave May Last Three More Months, China CDC Veteran Warns
It remains to be seen if the help will be sufficient or come in time.

“The plans dedicated to Covid control and prevention in rural areas are well devised, but how to implement them is a big problem,” said Zeng Guang, the former chief scientist at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, at a recent seminar.

UCLA’s Zhang said the lack of information about infections makes it hard to predict the scope of severe disease and deaths ahead. Still, the epidemiologist originally from eastern China is worried about the lingering damage, well after the joy from the reunions has faded and travelers have returned to their jobs in distant factories and cities.

“This New Year travel could bring about inevitably catastrophic consequences for many families,” he said.

— With assistance by John Liu and Dong Lyu

Direct Air Capture (DAC) since 12 Jan 2023

7 locations in Japan and abroad selected for underground CO2 capture and storage...Government aims for early commercialization through intensive support [The Yomiuri Shimbun, 13 Jun 2023]

The Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) has selected seven sites in Japan and abroad for the commercialization of carbon dioxide capture and storage (CCS), which is considered a trump card in the fight against global warming, with the aim of establishing a business model quickly through intensive government support. The government will soon make an announcement and begin providing business support from fiscal 2023.

The selected sites are off the coast of Kyushu, which is planned by the Eneos Group and Power Development Corporation, and the coast of Hokkaido, which is under consideration by Idemitsu Kosan and others, as well as a total of five domestic sites in Tohoku, Niigata, and the Tokyo metropolitan area, and two overseas sites off Malaysia and in the waters of Oceania.

All of these projects are led by Japanese companies and aim to collect CO2 from thermal power plants and oil refineries and transport it by ship or pipeline for storage.

CCS has been in practical use overseas since the 1990s, but in Japan it has been limited to demonstration experiments because the initial cost is huge, several tens of billions of yen, and profitability is difficult to predict.

In April, the Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry (METI) publicly solicited "advanced projects" for support in order to hasten the commercialization of CCS in Japan. A committee of academic experts narrowed down the list to seven locations after carefully examining CO2 capture and transport methods, storage areas, and other factors.

The government has set a goal of storing 6 to 12 million tons of CO2 underground annually by the year 2008. If the seven sites are commercialized, it is expected that approximately 13 million tons of CO2, equivalent to slightly more than 1% of Japan's annual CO2 emissions, will be stored by FY30.

The companies participating in each project will sign an outsourcing contract with the Japan Energy, Metals and Minerals Corporation (JOGMEC), which is under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI), and in fiscal 2011 will proceed with the design of CO2 capture facilities and surveys to select the storage areas.

According to METI's calculations, in order to achieve "carbon neutrality," which means virtually zero CO2 emissions by the year 50, the amount of CO2 stored by CCS should be 120 to 240 million tons per year.

CCS = Technology that captures carbon dioxide and traps it on the seabed or underground, effectively reducing emissions. CCS is an acronym for Carbon Dioxide, Capture, and Storage.

Cheaper method to capture carbon dioxide could shake up industry [Chemistry World, 23 May 2023]

BY BÁRBARA PINHO23 MAY 2023

Scientists have created a guanidinium sulfate salt that can capture and store carbon dioxide at ambient pressures and temperatures, with little energy input. The strategy could change how industry captures, transports and stores the gas.
An international team of scientists charged an aqueous Gua2SO4 solution with carbon dioxide and saw a single-crystalline guanidinium sulfate-based clathrate salt form at ambient conditions. Because the solution encased carbon dioxide without forming strong bonds with the gas, researchers were able to easily reverse the process to release the gas again.
Cafer Yavuz, a researcher from King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia and one of the study authors, says that releasing trapped carbon dioxide has never been so easy. ‘All you have to do is just take this [resulting precipitate], shovel it into water, the water dissolves the salt and CO2 comes up,’ he explains. ‘It’s almost like the tablets we use to drink vitamin C. You put it in the water and bubbles [appear]. It’s CO2 coming up.’
After the carbon dioxide was released, the team found that the resulting Gua2SO4 solution was immediately ready for another cycle of carbon dioxide uptake.
Currently, the most common method of removing carbon dioxide from a gas stream involves capturing the molecule via chemisorption, usually using an amine sorbent. While this strategy is highly selective for carbon dioxide, the energy demand is high. Gua2SO4captures the gas equally well without expending nearly as much energy.
‘It’s unique, because it has perfect selectivity like in chemisorption. But no chemical bonds are formed between CO2 and the host, like in physisorption. It’s weird. It’s in between, it’s a quasi-chemisorption quasi-physisorption state,’ adds Yavuz.
But while the salt looks promising for the carbon capture industry, Yavuz foresees other applications. Because the resulting powder is stable at ambient conditions, the clathrate could be useful to carry and store CO2, as well as capture it from industrial sources. This isn’t necessarily a problem that needs to be solved because there’s already infrastructure to transport and store CO2, but Yavuz still believes the clathrate could improve the entire carbon capture chain and cut down on costly infrastructure. ‘The best thing this powder [could be] used for is for the mobility of CO2, to carry [it] in a truck or for storing it,’ Yavuz adds.
Alexander Forse, who works on new materials for carbon capture at the University of Cambridge and was not involved in the study, says the work is impressive, and applying it to real-world scenarios will be an interesting next step. ‘This is an exciting new way to think about capturing carbon dioxide from industrial emissions like cement plants,’ he says. ‘I’m curious to see how energy-efficient this technology can be, and whether the kinetics are rapid enough to enable a practical carbon capture system.’

References
Z Xiang et al, Cell Rep. Phys. Sci., 2023, 4, 101383 (DOI: 10.1016/j.xcrp.2023.101383)

Georgia Tech College of Engineering Carbon capture: how does CO2 removal work? [Phys.org, 19 Jan 2023]

by Marlowe HOOD

With global temperatures still on the rise, even the most sceptical of scientists agree that carbon dioxide removal (CDR) is crucial to meet the Paris Agreement goal of capping global warming below two degrees Celsius.

A new global assessment published Thursday says limiting global warming at liveable levels will be impossible without massively scaling up CDR.

But even the most ardent promoters of carbon removal technology insist that slashing emissions remains the primary objective, even if the continued failure to do so has pushed CDR sharply higher on the climate agenda.

Methods range from conventional techniques like restoring or expanding CO2-absorbing forests and wetlands, to more novel technologies such as direct air capture.

Here AFP explains the essentials on CO2 removal:

What is CO2 removal?
There are basically two ways to extract CO2 from thin air.

One is to boost nature's capacity to absorb and stockpile carbon. Healing degraded forests, restoring mangroves, industrial-scale tree planting, boosting carbon uptake in rocks or the ocean—all fall under the hotly debated category of "nature-based solutions".

The second way—called direct air capture—uses chemical processes to strip out CO2, then recycles it for industrial use or locks it away in porous rock formations, unused coal beds or saline aquifers.

A variation known as bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, or BECCS, combines elements from both approaches.

Wood pellets or other biomass is converted into biofuels or burned to drive turbines that generate electricity. The CO2emitted is roughly cancelled out by the CO2 absorbed during plant growth.

But when carbon dioxide in the power plant's exhaust is syphoned off and stored underground, the process becomes a net-negative technology.

Do we really need it?
Yes, for a couple of reasons.

Even if the world begins drawing down carbon pollution by three, four or five percent each year—and that is a significant "if"—some sectors like cement and steel production, long-haul aviation and agriculture are expected to maintain significant emission levels for decades.

The first-ever State of Carbon Dioxide report concluded that CDR must extract between 450 billion and 1.1 trillion tonnes of CO2 over the remainder of the 21st century—the equivalent of 10 to 30 times annual CO2 emissions today.

And there is another reason.
The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) makes it alarmingly clear that the 1.5C threshold will be breached in the coming decades no matter how aggressively greenhouse gases are drawn down.

CO2 lingers in the atmosphere for centuries, which means that the only way to bring Earth's average surface temperature back under the wire by 2100 is to suck some of it out of the air.

What's hot, what's not?
BECCS was pencilled into IPCC climate models more than a decade ago as the theoretically cheapest form of negative emissions, but has barely developed since.

A peer-reviewed proposal in 2019 to draw down excess CO2 by planting a trillion trees sparked huge excitement in the media and among gas and oil companies that have made afforestation offsets a central to their efforts to align with Paris treaty goals.

But the idea was sharply criticised by experts, who pointed out that it would require converting twice the area of India into mono-culture tree farms.

The inside of a Climeworks CO2-removal factory in Iceland.

"I don't see a BECCS boom," said Oliver Geden, a senior fellow at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs and an expert on CDR.

Also, planting trees to soak up CO2 is fine—until the forests burn down in climate-enhanced wildfires.

Among all the carbon dioxide removal methods, direct air capture is among the least developed but the most talked about.

How fast can we scale up?
Direct air capture (DAC) is a large-scale industrial process that requires huge amounts of energy to run.

Existing technology is also a long way from making a dent in the problem.

The amount, for example, of CO2 potentially extracted from what will be the world's largest direct air capture plant (36,000 tonnes)—being built in Iceland by Swiss company Climeworks—is equivalent to 30 seconds' worth of current global emissions (about 40 billion tonnes).

But the trajectory of earlier technologies such as solar panels suggests that scaling the industry up to remove billions of tonnes per year is not out of reach.

"It's at the upper end of what we've seen before," University of Wisconsin–Madison professor Gregory Nemet. "It's a huge challenge, but it's not unprecedented."

Climeworks announced last week the world's first certified CO2removal and storage on behalf of paying clients, including Microsoft and software service company Stripe.

Georgia Tech College of Engineering Cutting Emissions Isn't Enough. We Need to Scrub Carbon Directly from the Air [Carbon Brief, 19 Jan 2023]

By Joshua Stewart

New Direct Air Capture Center will leverage Georgia Tech’s leadership in a burgeoning field.
In 2015, nearly 200 countries agreed: they would reduce their emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases to limit warming of the earth’s atmosphere to well below 2 degrees Celsius.

The Paris Agreement actually aims for 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels to avoid potential catastrophic changes to our climate. But it’s become increasingly clear to climate scientists and policymakers that just reducing emissions is not enough.

“We now know that we probably should have stopped putting massive amounts of CO2 in the air 10, 20, 30 years ago to prevent the climate from getting above 2 degrees C,” said Chris Jones, a chemical engineer at Georgia Tech. “Now we've waited so long to reduce our emissions that we need to develop technologies that are referred to as negative emissions technologies that remove CO2 from the atmosphere.”

Jones was one of a handful of scientists who co-authored a landmark National Academies report in 2018 that outlined a variety of approaches to negative emissions. Agricultural practices and forest management are options — essentially using nature’s ability to grab carbon dioxide out of the air and lock it away in plants and soil. But Jones said we’ll need quicker and more direct approaches.

“We could plant billions of trees to do this, but there's not enough available land. And the trees don't grow fast enough for us to do this quickly enough to slow global warming at the rate required,” said Jones, John F. Brock III School Chair in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering (ChBE). “That's where direct air capture comes in: It's a chemical engineering way of designing a process that takes CO2 out of the air.”

Direct air capture is a bit like a massive household air purifier — but for the globe. Systems would pull air across specially designed filter materials with molecules that grab CO2. When the filters are saturated, they’re cleaned, and the carbon dioxide is pumped underground for storage in the very places we’ve extracted oil and natural gas over the decades.

It’s a technology proposed only in 1999, with companies launched in 2008, and is now quickly becoming a reality, according to another Georgia Tech chemical engineer, Matthew Realff.

“It's definitely a technology that is moving past the lab; it's in the pilot scale/deployment phase as an initial technology. By 2030, we should see deployment of what I would call the first commercial-scale facilities in different places in the United States — systems that can remove a million tons of CO2 a year,” said Realff, professor and David Wang Sr. Fellow in ChBE. He pointed to a $3.5 billion federal investment to develop four regional direct air capture hubs that was part of federal infrastructure legislation passed in 2021.

“If you're going to make a difference, to be honest, it really needs to be at about 1,000 times that scale, a gigaton scale of direct air capture,” Realff continued. “Some people would argue that we might need even more than that two to three decades from now, depending on how our emissions reduction efforts go.”

Realff and Jones are working at different ends of the direct air capture spectrum — the systems and molecular levels — to develop the technology. In between is ChBE professor Ryan Lively, who works on materials, devices, and processes. Now they’re recruiting more of their Georgia Tech colleagues to the cause with a newly established Direct Air Capture Center (DirACC) within Tech’s Strategic Energy Institute.

The center is an effort to seed interesting ideas across engineering, sciences, policy, and more and leverage Georgia Tech’s longstanding leadership in the area. Lively said DirACC will fill a need nationally to act as a convener of researchers, industry, funders, and other stakeholders.

It is one of a few centers in the nation focused on direct air capture and the first such effort to encompass the complete supply chain of capture and sequestration of CO2 from the air.
Leveraging Longstanding Leadership

“As an institution, Georgia Tech has essentially been involved since the direct air capture field’s infancy,” Jones said.

Jones has led collaborations since 2008 with one of the original startup companies in the field, Global Thermostat. Lively leads an Energy Frontier Research Center that received a rare third round of funding from the U.S. Department of Energy in 2022 and that’s working on how materials for clean-energy technology evolve and degrade. One of the focus areas is direct air capture.

Alongside the 2018 National Academies report, Congress introduced a federal tax credit for removing carbon dioxide from the air. Lawmakers more than tripled those incentives to $180 per ton in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. Jones said that got people’s attention.

“Since 2018, we've had billions of dollars of legislation for direct air capture technology research and development. That trend is why we are launching the Direct Air Capture Center now: We really want to communicate to the outside that we are a hub in this space.”

Tim Lieuwen, executive director of Georgia Tech’s Strategic Energy Institute, said the new center will extend beyond developing the science and technology: “It’s exciting to see Georgia Tech also engaging more broadly in the societal-level considerations associated with deployment of direct air capture, including community engagement, workforce development, and ensuring a just transition for historically marginalized populations.”

Just Like in Real Estate, Location Matters
Jones works at the first step of the carbon-capture process: the molecules that link with CO2 to pull it out of the air. One of the areas he’s become most interested in is customizing different materials for different locations and climates.

“A molecule or a material that we studied five years ago maybe failed operating at 80 degrees Fahrenheit. That would not work in Atlanta or in Florida, but maybe it works really well if we go to 50 degrees F or 20 degrees F, and we can deploy it in Montana,” Jones said. “We're starting to think more about whether we might have advantaged materials or advantaged processes in particular locations.”

Chris Jones, left, and Ryan Lively hold two kinds of filters for direct air capture systems. The test rig behind them uses the larger filter Jones is holding.

In a future where direct air capture is widely deployed — say, 20 years from now — Jones said there could be a dozen different solutions customized to different locations around the globe.

He said Georgia Tech has an opportunity to get ahead of that curve and design the right solutions for the right environments.

Realff’s work on systems and process modeling plugs in here. His team works to extrapolate the economics and the lifecycle of materials and lab-scale direct air capture modules to real-world performance. If Jones and Lively have data from experiments at different temperatures and humidities, for example, Realff might model how those materials would work over the course of a year.

“That's the frontier of where we're working right now, understanding how environmental variability impacts the performance of the direct air capture system,” Realff said.

Practicality Matters, Too
Another frontier is engineering carbon capture materials that will last long enough to be economically practical, Lively said.

When Jones creates molecules that grab carbon dioxide out of the air, Lively incorporates them into fibers that can be bundled together or even woven into fabric. Those fibers seem to be durable, but the question is whether the delicate chemistry of the molecules repeatedly capturing and then releasing the CO2 can hold up. The DOE-funded center Lively leads is working in part to better understand how these materials evolve and degrade.

“One of the key cost drivers is, how long can you make these things last?” Lively said. “We know what the answer should be: If you can get them to where they largely maintain their performance for a year to a year and a half, then you're in good shape. We're just not sure if we can get there yet.”

Creating fibers for use in a canister, filter, or other device has become a fairly mature technology, Lively said, so the team is working now to move some of their materials into the commercial market. He’s also experimenting with 3D printing approaches that can create more complex structures with the materials — though at a cost.

“The nice part about 3D printing is you can get really complex structures that you can't get with fibers. But the manufacturing process is fundamentally slower,” Lively said. “The complexity of the device is going to have to make up for the slower rate at which you can make it, because the slower rate will mean higher cost.”

Air Capture and Renewables as a One-Two Punch
One of the newer projects Realff, Jones, and Lively are working on would pair carbon capture systems with wind farms.

They’re exploring systems that would be passive: Instead of relying on some mechanism to blow or draw air across the filters that extract CO2, natural wind would move air across the filters in these systems. It turns out, a wind speed of around 6 meters per second is enough velocity, Realff said — and it’s also just enough to turn a wind turbine and generate power, although higher velocities are preferred.

“If you integrate passive capture with wind farms, now your turbines are helping mix the air.

You could think about having alternating banks of direct air capture and then turbines,” Realff said. “The turbines generate the power to enable the direct air capture system to work; you don't have to connect either one of them to the grid.”

Realff said the system the researchers are developing is relatively simple, using the wind electricity to heat up a resistor and release the carbon dioxide and regenerate the filters so they can remove more CO2. Lively called this “all-electric” approach a second-generation system. Current direct air capture technology uses steam or hot water, for example, to heat the filters and release the captured CO2.

“If you think about it, I want to put a passive contactor where I have a lot of wind — which is also where I want to build a wind farm. There’s a natural coupling of those two,” Realff said.

When A Double-Negative is a Positive
Another emerging idea would pair direct air capture systems with natural gas combined-cycle power plants. These plants use gas to turn a turbine and generate electricity. The waste heat from that process is then used to create steam that turns another turbine and generates more power.

Realff, Jones, and Lively have partnered with ChBE’s Fani Boukouvala and Joe Scott on a project funded by the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy to instead use that steam to do conventional post-combustion carbon capture and to power a direct air capture system.
“With the combination of those two systems, we can get natural gas combined-cycle plants that can operate and be net negative in their carbon dioxide,” Realff said.

In fact, he said, the reduction in carbon from such a system would be enough to wipe out the carbon emissions of another power plant operating at full capacity.

“For power companies, it gives you a way to get to essentially zero carbon by modifying, say, roughly half your fleet of natural gas combined-cycle plants.”

No Time to Waste
Those kinds of advances will be critical to making direct air capture economical enough to have impact, the researchers said.

Jones called it a generational challenge akin the NASA’s failure-is-not-an-option mantra during the 1960s moon missions.

“The level of funding and interest is pretty enormous, but the challenge, unfortunately, might be even more enormous than the interest,” Lively said. “The longer we wait, the bigger the challenge.”

Solar energy technology was promising but too expensive to be practical when it debuted in the late 1970s and early ‘80s. Now, it’s cheap and common. The difference with direct air capture is the timeline: We can’t afford to wait 40 years to scale.

Jones pointed to solar energy as a useful analogy for getting to a future with widespread removal of atmospheric carbon. Initially, the technology was promising but too expensive to be practical when it debuted in the late 1970s and early ‘80s. Now, it’s cheap and common. The difference with direct air capture is the timeline: We can’t afford to wait 40 years to scale.

“Today, direct air capture from the initial startup companies costs between, say, $600 and $1,000 a ton. The target, in order to have it be widespread deployed all over the world, is about $100 a ton,” he said. “We can't have a five- or 10-year technology testing period; it's got to be a year or 18 months so that we can build it, operate it, learn from it, revise it, build it, operate it, learn from it. We need to do that five or 10 times to get the cost down.”

A possible carbon-capture milestone in the fight against climate change [CBS News, 12 Jan 2023]

BY IRINA IVANOVA

In what could be a major milestone in the fight against climate change, a startup said Thursday it has started successfully pulling carbon dioxide from the air and burying it underground.

Climeworks announced that it has sequestered CO2 from the atmosphere using its facility in Iceland and stored the substance underground. The action was independently verified by risk management company DNV, and the resulting carbon credits were sold to Microsoft, Shopify and Stripe, the startup's first corporate customers.

Companies purchase carbon credits to offset their own carbon emissions. Microsoft in 2020 made a bold promise to erase its entire carbon footprint since the company's 1975 founding.

Founded in 2009, Climeworks has already successfully demonstrated that its direct-air capture technology works. However, Thursday's milestone marks the first time a company has pulled a significant amount of carbon from the air using a third-party verification process, the Wall Street Journal reported.

"We hope we are growing from a teenager to a grown-up in this industry," Christoph Gebald, co-chief executive of Climeworks, told the newspaper.

Climeworks' direct-air capture (DAC) facility in Hellisheidi, Iceland, in 2021.CLIMEWORKS
Climeworks declined to say how much carbon has been removed — a key metric in assessing how important carbon-capture will be in the fight to slow global warming.

Once its carbon-capture plant in Iceland is at full scale, which it has not yet reached, it will remove 4,000 tons a year of carbon dioxide, a company spokesperson said. That's roughly equivalent to the amount of CO2 emitted by 800 cars driving for a year.

There is a growing consensus among scientists and policymakers that to prevent the worst effects of global warming, people will need to not only reduce greenhouse-gas emissions close to zero but also remove carbon that has already been emitted.

In addition to low-tech ways of achieving this, such as planting trees and restoring wetlands, the high-tech promise of removing carbon directly from the atmosphere has captured the public imagination and billions of investor dollars.

Congress funneled $12 billion into carbon-capture efforts in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law of 2021 and expanded funding for carbon storage in last year's Inflation Reduction Act.

Private investors, too, are champing at the bit. Last year saw a surge in venture capital dedicated to post-emissions carbon capture, with deals in the second quarter of 2022 hitting a record, according to PitchBook.

Climeworks founders Christoph Gebald and Jan Wurzbacher pose in front of the company's carbon-capture facility in Hellisheidi, Iceland in 2021.

CLIMEWORKS
Climeworks has also committed to creating a carbon-capture hub in the Gulf Coast of the U.S., a facility it says will remove 1 million tons of CO2 annually by the end of the decade.

"There is no solution to get to net-zero without carbon capture technology," Collin O'Mara, CEO of the National Wildlife Federation, said last year, reflecting a common view among environmental scientists.

But despite the hype, some scientists harbor considerable doubt about whether direct-air capture technology can ever advance to the point of economic feasibility. Attempts to clean up U.S. coal plants using carbon capture have largely been an expensive failure, according to a government report, and direct-air capture projects often use tremendous amounts of power — negating their environmental benefits.

A recent study also found that carbon-capture technology would put added stress on the world's water supply, an already scarce resource in many parts of the world.